Politics makes strange bedfellows: Cultural Revolution chapter
The historian Götz Aly devotes a chapter of his book on the fabled year 1968 to the view among activists of the German New Left in the 1960s of China and the Cultural Revolution in particular. (1) Aly’s account doesn’t conceal his obvious disdain of any hint of sympathy for or inspiration from Chinese Maoism on left activists in Germany. But, like Lovell, he describes how some radicals took inspiration from what they took to be a revolutionary mass movement that offered an image of popular participation overcoming tendencies toward bureacratic rigidity and conservatism that were widely associated with “Stalinism” and the Soviet system more generally.
An ideology that was revolutionary but distanced itself from the Soviet Union
One of the distinctions of the Chinese position in the Sino-Soviet ideological debates was that the Maoist view defended Stalin and its own understanding of Stalinist ideology. This was articulated particularly in terms of the priority Maoism of the era placed on “armed struggle,” as opposed to the Soviet positions on “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist/imperialist world and the possibility of a peaceful transition to socialism via parliamentary means. In practice, the USSR and China both funded armed insurrectionary movements - in some countries like Vietnam the same one, in others like Angola competing ones.
But the search for ideological purity is an annoying but integral part of politics, and not just radical politics. For a recent example in the US and Europe, see the bizarre, hair-splitting controversies over whether the phrase “from the river to the sea” is a call for genocide against Jews (when used by those protesting Israel’s current war against civilians in Gaza) or a virtuous goal (when found in the Likud Party’s founding document or in pronouncement by Bibi Netanyahu).
In the long history of Marxist polemics, Trotskyism was and is a trend that considers itself the true heir to pure Leninist principles, just as conventional Soviet Marxist-Leninism of the “Stalinist” variety did until the mid-1950s. And Nikita Khrushchev’s criticism of aspects of Stalinist theory and practice also positioned itself as true Marxism-Leninism without embracing Trotskyism - which generally considered the Khrushchev-era view as still far too Stalinist for their liking.
So how is it that some nonconformists and antiwar activists in the US and North America found attractive a Maoist ideology that featured a massive political purge (which the Cultural Revolution was in significant part) and promoted an explicitly Stalinist ideology broadly identified with regimentation and brutal political suppression of dissent?
Russell Jacoby argued in 1976 that the New Left in the US criticized aspects of the US Communist Party but were also intensely aware that McCarthyist-type “anti-Communism” actually was directed not just as the Communist Party but broadly at leftists of all kinds. (2) (He could have added that they were often directed at liberals, as well.) As a result, “There remains a deep, practically instinctual suspicion that any critical evaluation of Stalinism and the old left [i.e., the Soviet-line Communist Party] is anti-communist.”
He also observed:
The preoccupation with Stalin and Stalinist literature has been inspired by the Chinese Revolution. More exactly, this inspiration has been filtered through the Chinese/ Russian rift. ... [T]o Western observers it appears as if the Chinese are defending Stalin's policy, thought, and strategies against a Russian "revisionism" which began with Khrushchev. ...
The most obvious event was the Khrushchev speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (C.P.S.U.) (February, 1956), which was essentially a denunciation of Stalin. Because of this association of Khrushchev with opposition to Stalin, subsequent differences between the Russians and Chinese are often couched, and interpreted, in terms of attacks and defenses of Stalin - even though they have little to do with Stalin.
This gets into the polemical weeds which Julia Lovell mostly manages to avoid. But Jacoby also noted that the Chinese version of “Stalinism” came with qualifications:
In fact, … the official position of the Chinese is that Stalin made "serious errors,” and one should be well aware how much is squeezed into the phrase "serious errors." For example, one of the Chinese "defenses" of Stalin states: "While defending Stalin, we do not defend his mistakes ... . In the late twenties, the thirties, and the early and middle forties, the Chinese Marxist-Leninists represented by Comrades Mao Tse-Tung and Liu Shao-chi resisted the influence of Stalin's mistakes. " lt need hardly be emphasized that here Stalin's mistakes span the entire history of the Chinese Revolution [during Stalin’s lifetime] - as indeed they do. [my emphasis]
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also made the (Maoist) argument that the “revisionist” leadership was restoring capitalism in the USSR. If this seems like an ideological rabbit-hole, that impression isn’t entirely wrong. The French Marxist Charles Bettelheim made a detailed version of this argument in a two-volume work, Class Struggles in the USSR. (3) By 1978, he was arguing that the post-Mao Chinese leadership was falling into ideological heresy: “The new leadership of the Chinese Communist Party has been condemned by history. In the long run it can only suffer defeats, as the entire history of revisionism shows.” (4)
It’s worth noting in passing here that conventional contemporary descriptions of the People’s Republic of China often assume that today’s Chinese economy is “capitalist,” at least in some important ways. Quick reference guide: the parts of which they approve are praised as capitalist, the parts they don’t like condemned as socialism and Communism.
The spirit of the times: liberation movements in the “Third World”
One of the activists and thinkers mentioned in Lovell’s account of Maoism in the US and Europe, Bruce Franklin, published a political autobiography in 2018 in which he described the significance of postcolonial movements in the decades after the Second World War:
Between 1945 and 19491 independence from colonial rule was won by one-fourth of the world's population, as outright colonialism crumbled throughout much of Asia, including Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, and the Philippines. In 1949 with the victory of the Communist revolution in China, another quarter of the world's population escaped from the "Open Door" version of colonialism decreed for China by Washington in 1899. Belgium, France, England, and Portugal were determined to keep their African colonies, a fight that was decided when Belgium lost their Congo (1960), France lost Algeria (1962), Britain lost Kenya (1963), and Portugal lost Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique (1974-1975). Just as in Vietnam, the colonial powers could count on the support of the United States throughout their losing wars. As Martin Luther King Jr. so succinctly put it in 1967, the United States was fighting "on the wrong side of world revolution." Vietnam's three decades of war against European and U.S. imperialism from 1945 to 1975 exactly matched the period of the destruction of European global colonialism. (5)
China was the largest of those developing countries and one that had a vision of leading the nations now referred to as the Global South or Global Majority. So it’s understandable that China’s public positions would have attracted some amount of sympathetic attention for those inclined to favor those national liberation movements. And that did include many in the civil rights movement in the US and those inspired by it elsewhere.
The US policy after the Second World War was generally against formal (de jure) colonies. The support by the US and the Soviet Union for Israel’s War of Independence in 1948 was in part a shared commitment to formally ending colonialism and to reducing the relative power of Great Britain. It’s not much mentioned today, but the USSR and Czechoslovakia were considerably more immediately important in their military assistance to Israel than the US in that conflict. (6) What is mentioned today much more often in the US and Europe is that the “anticolonial” nature of Israel’s founding was less than thorough.
Images and symbols associated with Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara had a inspirational value for radical activists and provided shock value to shake up “normies” whose attention was captured by the unusual and often shocking nature of the symbolism. (“Normie” is a more recent term. In the US in the 1960s and early 1970s, “straights” would have been a more normal mildly disparaging term for the conventional political mainstream, but “straight” has long since acquired a different connotation.)
As Quinn Slobodian observed, looking at Maoism in the 1970s means dealing both “with what Mao means now” and “what he meant then.” (7) In Europe, Slobodian sees two major strands of Maoism in Europe in that period: “anti-Soviet Marxist Maoism and subcultural or Dada Maoism,” the later referring to the shocking-symbolism variety.
Novelty always has some advantage in political marketing. That was true for protests movement in the 1960s and 1970s, as it is now. Lovell recounts some famous examples of figures such as the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre who were attracted at least superficially to Maoist themes. The famous Argentine populist Juan Perón from exile in Spain expressed his own identification with Mao, as did some of his most militant supporters back home, some of them using the slogan, “Mao y Perón / Un solo corazón” (Mao and Perón/A single heart.” (8)
An ornately detailed screen given to Evita Peron by Chinese leader Mao Zedong and behind which the Argentine populist diva dressed and undressed is among thousands of missing items at the heart of a legal battle about to unfold in Buenos Aires.A one-time German Maoist activist told Deutsche Welle in 2016 about the experience:
An ornately detailed screen given to Evita Peron by Chinese leader Mao Zedong and behind which the Argentine populist diva dressed and undressed is among thousands of missing items at the heart of a legal battle about to unfold in Buenos Aires.
The wooden dressing screen was gifted some time between 1946 and 1952 in solidarity between Mao's country and that of Juan Domingo Peron, the late Argentine strongman and husband of Evita. (9)
"When I came to Berlin, there were many Marxist-Leninist organizations. Many students were taking part in training sessions, reading Marx's 'Capital' and texts about the workers' movements etc. And China and the Cultural Revolution played an important role," said Gottfried Schmitt.
Today, he still has a copy of Mao's bible in his bookcase. The other shelves are full of literature and art books. Mao sits besides Picasso and Giacometti. Schmitt's "Red Book" is a well-maintained pocket-edition from 1968. The collection of quotations and texts by Chairman Mao Zedong was printed and published in the People's Republic of China.
"Maoism and the Cultural Revolution were interesting because they were an attempt within the Communist Party of China to put into practice the model of perpetual disempowerment of the elites. The keyword was permanent revolution. Even in socialist societies, there is a tendency for established bureaucracies to develop and basically rehabilitate the old bourgeois structures. Mao saw that very clearly. In Berlin, we had the so called real socialism of the German Democratic Republic before our eyes. But it didn't provide a model of society that was attractive to young angry and rebellious students." (10) [my emphasis]
Slobodian also suggests that constructions like the Global North Maoists’ contemporaneous image of the Cultural Revolution may be an indispensable part of galvanizing liberation movements: “Distant objects of identification, we might conclude, are not optional but necessary for domestic orientation.”
Attempts to move Maoism into more than marginal influence
The success of “Maoism” as a political force in the US and Europe turned out to be limited. Neoliberalism had great practical success, most of which worked against the well-being of ordinary citizens and the health of democracy. In the US, the rise of Christian Nationalism out of the Reagan Republican variant of neoliberalism also became a highly influential political project with all-too-grim successes, now having merged into Trumpism.
In roughly the decade after 1968, attempts to build Maoist-inspired Leninist parties remained small and generally isolated from larger progressive movements like the rise in public-employee union activism or the active and partially successful pressures to limit rogue covert operations and destructive interventions in places like Chile, Argentina, and Nicaragua.
Jim O'Brien in 1977 wrote about such efforts in the US:
China was attractive to these people less for the details of its political and economic life than for the hope it offered for revolution in the U .S. In the Chinese government's world view, the Soviet Union had been a socialist country for decades, and then after Stalin's death in 1953 had veered toward capitalism and imperialism. No American Maoist group has been able to defend this historical position intelligibly, but for all of them it provided the assurance that they - rather than the much larger CP - were in the mainstream of twentieth century Communism. (11)
His conclusion for the US and Western Europe:
The experience in the U.S. is basically the same as in other advanced capitalist countries, only on a smaller scale since our left is much less significant than elsewhere. Nowhere has a left-Leninist party, whether Trotskyist or Maoist or neither, threatened seriously to displace a Communist party or even to gather most of the left-Leninist forces in the country under its wing. … The experience of recent years [of the US groups he discusses] suggests that the goal is a will-of-the-wisp [sic].
O’Brien also points out in contrast to the network of Communist Parties headed by the Soviet Union, “In the 1970s, however, the Chinese leadership showed no interest in playing a comparable role in regard to the array of Maoist organizations in the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries.” They did at various times make sympathetic nods to left groups. But by the late 1960s and especially after China’s military clash with the Soviet Union in 1969 (12), China was looking to build cooperation with the US and other NATO countries to balance against the USSR. Actively promoting any kind of serious revolutionary groups in those countries, much less actively assisting military activities in pursuit of them, was not a priority for Mao in those years or for his successors after his death.
Coming in Part 5:Former French Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos) and Peru
Notes:
(1) Aly, Götz (2008, 2.Auflage): Unser Kampf 1968 - ein irritierter Blick zurück, 104-120. Frankfurt-am-Main: S. Fischer Verlag. Quinn Slobodian considers Aly’s treatment to be an example of “mea culpa Maoism,” a kind of post-Maoist self-criticism, we might say. Slobodian, Quinn (2016): Maoism in the Global 1960s. NYU Shanghai 03/13/2016.<https://www.academia.edu/26839510/Maoism_in_the_Global_1960s> (Accessed: 2024-15-05).
(2) Jacoby, Russell (1976): Stalin, Marxism-Leninism and the Left. Somerville MA: New England Free Press.
(3) Bettlheim, Charles (1976): Class Struggles in the USSR: First Period: 1917-1923. New York & London: Monthly Review Press. Bettlheim, Charles (1978): Class Struggles in the USSR: Second Period: 1923-1930. New York & London: Monthly Review Press.
(4) Bettelheim, Charles (1978): The Great Leap Backward. Monthly Review 30:3 (July-August 1978), 37-130. <http://marx2mao.com/Other/GLB78.html> (Accessed: 2024-03-03).
(5) Franklin, H. Bruce (2018): Crash Course: From the Good War to the Foreever War, 10-11. New Brunswik, Camden, and Newark, & London: Rutgers University Press.
(6) Thomas Schmidt devotes several paragraphs of a recent article to recalling the Soviet support for Israel’s independence and the anti-colonial rhetoric they emphasized in describing that support. He uses it it as a polemical device against today’s “postcolonialist” critics of Israel. So it’s not surprising that he doesn’t explain the larger context in which that took place. Schmidt, Thomas (2024): Der weltweite Vormarchs des Antizionismus. Internationale Politik 79:2, 105-121. <https://internationalepolitik.de/de/der-weltweite-vormarsch-des-antizionismus>
(7) Slobodian, Quinn (2016): Maoism in the Global 1960s. NYU Shanghai 03/13/2016. <https://www.academia.edu/26839510/Maoism_in_the_Global_1960s> (Accessed: 2024-15-05).
(8) Feinmann, José Pablo (2015): Mao, Sartre y Zannini. Página/12 21.06.2015. <http://www.pagina12.com.ar/imprimir/diario/contratapa/1327537520150621.html> (Accessed: 2015-21-03).
Gómez, Andrés Tejada (2015): Página/12 12.04.2015. <https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/libros/10-5568-2015-04-12.html> (Accessed: 2024-15-03).
(9) Rizzi, Maximiliano (2014): Argentine court battle starts over Mao's gift to Evita. Sydney Morning Herald 11/15/2014. <https://www.smh.com.au/world/argentine-court-battle-starts-over-maos-gift-to-evita-20141115-11na8f.html> (Accessed: 2024-03-03).
(10) Ebbighausen, Rodion (2016): Cultural Revolution and Germany. DW In Focus 05/13/2016. <https://www.dw.com/en/chinas-cultural-revolution-and-germany/a-19249889> (Accessed: 2024-15-05).
(11) O’Brien, Jim (1977): American Leninism in the 1970s. Radical America 11:6/12;1 (Winter 1977-1978), 27-62. <https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1125404123276662.pdf>
(12) Radchenko., Sergej (2008): Fehlwahrnehmungen in den chinesisch-sowjetischen Krise 1966 bis 1969. In: Greiner, Bernd et al, (eds.), Krisen im Kalten Kreig. Studien zum Kalten Kreig, Bd. 2, 343-368. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition.
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