Badiou_CulturalRevolution

The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution? Alain Badiou Why? Why discuss the “Cultural Revolution”—which is the official name for a long period of serious disturbances in communist China between 1965 and 1976? For at least three reasons: 1. The Cultural Revolution has been a constant and lively reference of militant activity throughout the world, and particularly in France, at least between 1967 and 1976. It is part of our political history and the basis for the existence of the Maoist current, the only true political creation of the sixties and seventies. I can say “our,” I was part of it, and in a certain sense, to quote Rimbaud, “I am there, I am still there.” In the untiring inven- tiveness of the Chinese revolutionaries, all sorts of subjective and practi- cal trajectories have found their name. Already, to change subjectivity, to live otherwise, to think otherwise: the Chinese—and then we—called that positions 13:3 © 2005 by Duke University Press. positions 13:3 Winter 2005 482 “revolutionarization.” They said: “To change the human being in what is most profound.” They taught that in political practice, we must be both at once “the arrow and the bull’s eye,” because the old worldview is also still present within us. By the end of the sixties, we went everywhere: to the factories, to the suburbs, to the countryside. Tens of thousands of students became proletarian or went to live among the workers. For this too we had the words of the Cultural Revolution: the “great exchanges of experience,” “to serve the people,” and, always the essential slogan, the “mass alliance.” We fought against the brutal inertia of the PCF [French Communist Party], against its violent conservatism. In China too the party bureaucracy was attacked; that was called “to struggle against revisionism.” Even the splits, the confrontations between revolutionaries from different orientations, were referred to the Chinese way: “To hunt down the black gangsters,” to be finished with those who are “leftist in appearance and rightist in reality.” When we met with a popular political situation, a factory strike or a con- frontation with the fascistic landlords, we knew that we had “to excel in the discovery of the proletarian Left, to rally the Center, to isolate and crush the Right.” Mao’s Little Red Book has been our guide, not at all, as the dummies say, in the service of dogmatic catechism but, on the contrary, in order for us to clarify and invent new ways in all sorts of disparate situ- ations that were unknown to us. With regard to all this, since I am not one of those who cover their abandonment and their rallying to the established reaction with references to the psychology of illusions or to the morality of blindness, we can only quote our sources and pay homage to the Chinese revolutionaries. 2. The Cultural Revolution is the typical example (yet another notion from Maoism, the typical example: a revolutionary find that must be gen- eralized) of a political experience that saturates the form of the party-state. I use the category of “saturation” in the sense given to it by Sylvain Laza- rus:1 I will attempt to show that the Cultural Revolution is the last signifi- cant political sequence that is still internal to the party-state (in this case, the Chinese Communist Party) and fails as such. Already, May ’68 and its aftermath, that is something slightly different. The Polish movement or Chiapas, that is something very different. The Political Organization, that is something absolutely different. But without the saturation of the sixties Badiou ❘❘ The Cultural Revolution 483 and seventies, nothing would as yet be thinkable, outside the specter of the party-state, or the parties-state.2 3. The Cultural Revolution is a great lesson in history and politics, in his- tory as thought from within politics (and not the other way around). Indeed, depending on whether we examine this “revolution” (the word itself lies at the heart of the saturation) according to the dominant historiography or according to a real political question, we arrive at gripping disagreements. What matters is for us to see clearly that the nature of this discord is not of the order of empirical or positivist exactness or lack thereof. We can be in agreement as to the facts and end up with judgments that are perfectly opposed to one another. It is precisely this paradox that will serve us as a point of entry into the subject matter. Narratives The dominant historiographical version was compiled by various specialists, especially by sinologues, as early as 1968, and it has not changed since. It was consolidated by the fact that covertly it became the official version of a Chi- nese state, headed by Deng Xiaoping and dominated after 1976 by people who escaped from and sought revenge for the Cultural Revolution. What does this version say?3 That in terms of revolution, it was a matter of a power struggle at the top echelons of the bureaucracy of the party- state. That Mao’s economical voluntarism, incarnated in the call for “the Great Leap Forward,” was a complete failure leading to the return of fam- ine to the countryside. That, after this failure, Mao finds himself in the minority among the leading instances of the party and that a “pragmatic” group imposes its law, the dominant personalities of which are Liu Shaoqi (then named president of the republic), Deng Xiaoping (general secretary of the party), and Peng Zhen (mayor of Beijing). That, as early as 1963, Mao attempted to lead some counterattacks, but that he failed among the regular instances of the party. That he then had recourse to forces foreign to the party, be they external (the student Red Guards) or external/internal, particularly the army, over which he took control again after the elimina- tion of Peng Dehuai and his replacement by Lin Biao.4 That then, solely because of Mao’s will to regain power, there ensued a bloody and chaotic positions 13:3 Winter 2005 484 situation, which until the death of the culprit (in 1976) never managed to stabilize itself. It is totally feasible to accept that nothing in this version is, properly speaking, incorrect. But nothing gives it the real meaning that can come only from the political understanding of the episodes, that is, their concen- tration in a form of thinking still active today. 1. No stabilization? True. But that is because it turned out to be impos- sible to unfold the political innovation within the framework of the party- state. Neither the most extensive creative freedom of the student and work- ing masses (between 1966 and 1968), nor the ideological and state control of the army (between 1968 and 1971), nor the ad hoc solutions to the problems arranged in a Politburo dominated by the confrontation among antagonistic tendencies (between 1972 and 1976) allowed the revolutionary ideas to take root so that an entirely new political situation, completely detached from the Soviet model, could finally see the light of day on the scale of society as a whole. 2. Recourse to external forces? True. But this was meant, and it actually had the effect, both on a short-term and on a long-term basis, perhaps even until today, of a partial disentanglement of party and state. It was a matter of ruining bureaucratic formalism, at least for the duration of a gigantic movement. The fact that this provoked at the same time the anarchy of factions signals an essential political question for times to come: what gives unity to a politics, if it is not directly guaranteed by the formal unity of the state? 3. A struggle for power? Of course. It is rather ridiculous to oppose “power struggle” and “revolution,” since precisely by “revolution” we can only understand the articulation of antagonistic political forces over the question of power. Besides, the Maoists constantly quoted Lenin for whom explicitly the question of the revolution in the final instance is that of power. The true problem, which is very complex, would rather be to know whether the Cultural Revolution does not precisely put an end to the revolutionary conception of the articulation between politics and the state. In truth this was its great question, its central and violent debate. 4. The “Great Leap Forward,” a cruel failure? Yes, in many respects. But this failure is the result of a critical examination of Stalin’s economi- Badiou ❘❘ The Cultural Revolution 485 cal doctrine. It certainly cannot be attributed to a uniform treatment of questions related to the development of the countryside by “totalitarianism.” Mao severely examined (as witnessed by numerous written notes) the Stalin- ist conception of collectivization and its bottomless disdain for the peasants. His idea was certainly not to collectivize through force and violence in order to assure accumulation at all costs in the cities. It was, quite the contrary, to industrialize the countryside locally, to give it a relative economical auton- omy, in order to avoid the savage proletarization and urbanization that in the USSR had taken a catastrophic shape. In truth, Mao followed the com- munist idea of an effective resolution of the contradiction between city and countryside, and not that of a violent erasure of the countryside in favor of the cities. If there is a failure, it is of a political nature, and it is a completely different failure than Stalin’s. Ultimately, we should affirm that the same abstract description of facts by no means leads to the same mode of thinking, when it operates under different political axioms. Dates The quarrel is equally clear when it comes to dates. The dominant point of view, which is also that of the Chinese state, is that the Cultural Revolution lasted for ten years, from 1966 to 1976, from the Red Guards to Mao’s death. Ten years of troubles, ten years lost for a rational development. In fact, such dating can be defended, if one reasons from the strict point of view of the history of the Chinese state, with the following criteria: civil stability, production, a certain unity in the administrative top, cohesion in the army, etc. But this is not my axiom and these are not my criteria. If one examines the question of dates from the point of view of politics, of political invention, the principal criteria become the following: when can we say that there is a situation of collective creations of thought of the political type? When does practice with its directives stand in a verifiable excess over the tradition and function of the Chinese party-state? When do statements of universal value emerge? Then, we proceed in a completely different way to determine the boundaries of the process named the “Great Proletarian Cul- tural Revolution,” which we among ourselves called “the GPCR.” positions 13:3 Winter 2005 486 As far as I am concerned, I propose to say that the Cultural Revolution, in this conception, forms a sequence that goes from November 1965 to July 1968. I can even accept (this is a discussion of political technique) a drastic reduction, which would situate the revolutionary moment properly speak- ing between May 1966 and September 1967. The criterion is the existence of a political activity of the masses, its slogans, its new organizations, its own places. Through all of this an ambivalent but undeniable reference is constituted for all contemporary political thought worthy of the name. In this sense, there is “revolution” because there are the Red Guards, the revo- lutionary rebel workers, innumerable organizations and “general headquar- ters,” totally unpredictable situations, new political statements, texts without precedent, etc. Hypothesis How to proceed so that this gigantic seism is exposed to thought and makes sense to it today? I will formulate a hypothesis and experiment with it on several levels, both factual and textual, of the sequence I am referring to (i.e., China between November 1965 and July 1968). The hypothesis is the following: we are in the conditions of an essential division of the party-state (the Chinese Communist Party, in power since 1949). This division is essential in that it entails crucial questions about the future of the country: the economy and the relation between city and countryside; the eventual transformation of the army; the assessment of the Korean War; the intellectuals, universities, art, and literature; and, finally, the value of the Soviet, or Stalinist, model. But it is also and above all essen- tial because the minority trend among the party cadres is at the same time led, or represented, by the person whose historical and popular legitimacy is the greatest, that is, Mao Zedong. There is a formidable phenomenon of noncoincidence between the historicity of the party (the long period of the popular war, first against the Japanese, then against Chiang Kai-shek) and the present state of its activity as the framework of state power. Moreover, the Yan’an period will be constantly invoked during the Cultural Revolution, particularly in the army, as a model of communist political subjectivity. This phenomenon has the following consequences: the confrontation Badiou ❘❘ The Cultural Revolution 487 between positions does not manage to be ruled by bureaucratic formalism, but neither can it be ruled under the methods of terrorist purging used by Stalin in the thirties. In the space of the party-state, though, there is only formalism or terror. Mao and his group will have to invent a third recourse, the recourse to political mass mobilization, to try to break with the repre- sentatives of the majority trend and, in particular, their leaders at the upper echelons of the party and the state. This recourse supposes that one admit uncontrolled forms of revolt and organization. Mao’s group, after plenty of hesitation, will in fact impose that these be admitted, first in the universi- ties and then in the factories. But, in a contradictory move, it will also try to bring together all organizational innovations of the revolution in the general space of the party-state. Here we are at the heart of the hypothesis: the Cultural Revolution is the historical development of a contradiction. On the one hand, the issue is to arouse mass revolutionary action in the margins of the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or to acknowledge, in the theoretical jargon of the time, that even though the state is formally a “proletarian” state, the class struggle continues, including in the forms of mass revolt. Mao and his followers will go so far as to say that under socialism, the bourgeoisie reconstitutes itself and organizes itself within the communist party itself. On the other hand, with actual civil war still being excluded, the general form of the relation between the party and the state, in particular over the use of repressive forces, must remain unchanged at least insofar as it is not really a question of destroying the party. Mao will make this known by noting that “the overwhelming majority of cadres are good.” This contradiction at the same time will produce a succession of over- flows of the party’s authority by the local revolts, the violent anarchy of these overflows, the inevitability of a call to order of extraordinary brutality, and, in the end, the decisive entrance onto the stage of the popular army. The successive overflows establish the chronology (the stages) of the Cul- tural Revolution. The leading revolutionary group will first try to keep the revolt within the context of the educational units. This attempt began to fail in August 1966, when the Red Guards spread out into the cities. After- ward, it will be a question of containing the revolt within the frame of the school and university youth. But from the end of 1966 and particularly from January 1967 onward, workers become the principal force of the movement. Then the quest is on to keep the party and state administrations at a dis- tance, but they will be in the midst of the turmoil starting in 1967 through the movement of “power seizures.” Finally, the aim will be to keep the army in check at any cost as a power in reserve, a last resource. But this will turn out to be almost impossible with the unleashing of violence in August 1967 in Wuhan and Canton. It is precisely with an eye on the real risk of a scis- sion among the armed forces that the slow movement of repressive inversion will set in, beginning in September 1967. Let us put it like this: the political inventions, which gave the sequence its unquestionable revolutionary appeal, could not be deployed except as overflows with regard to the aim that was assigned to them by those whom the actors of the revolution themselves (the youth and its innumerable groups, the rebel workers . . .) considered to be their natural leaders: Mao and his minority group. By the same token, these inventions have always been localized and singular; they could not really turn into strategic and reproducible propositions. In the end, the strategic meaning (or the univer- sal range) of these inventions was a negative one. Because what they them- selves carried forth, and what they vitally impressed on the militant minds of the entire world, was nothing but the end of the party-state as the central production of revolutionary political activity. More generally, the Cultural Revolution showed that it was no longer possible to assign either the revolu- tionary mass actions or the organizational phenomena to the strict logic of class representation. That is why it remains a political episode of the highest importance. Experimental Fields I would like to experiment with the above hypothesis by putting it to the test of seven chosen referents, taken in chronological order: 1 The “Sixteen Points” circular of August 1966, which is perhaps for the most part from the hand of Mao himself, and which in any case is the most innovative central document, the one that breaks the most with the bureaucratic formalism of parties-states. 2 The Red Guards and Chinese society (from August 1966 to at least positions 13:3 Winter 2005 488 Badiou ❘❘ The Cultural Revolution 489 August 1967). Without a doubt, this involves an exploration of the lim- its of the political capacity of high school and university students more or less left to themselves, whatever the circumstances are. 3 The “revolutionary rebel workers” and the Shanghai Commune (January– February 1967), a capital and unfinished episode, because it proposes an alternative form of power to the centralism of the party. 4 The “power seizures”: “Great alliance,” “triple combination,” and “rev- olutionary committees,” from January 1967 to the spring of 1968. Here the question is whether the movement really creates new organizations or whether it amounts only to a regeneration of the party. 5 The Wuhan incident (July 1967). Here we are at the peak of the move- ment, the army risks division, and the Far Left pushes its advantage, but only to succumb. 6 The workers’ entering the universities (end of July 1968), which is in reality the final episode of the existence of independent student orga- nizations. 7 Mao’s cult of personality. This feature has so often been the object of sarcasms in the West that in the end we have forgotten to ask ourselves what meaning it might well have had and, in particular, what its mean- ing is within the Cultural Revolution, where the “cult” functioned as a flag, not for the party conservatives but for worker and student rebels. The Decision in Sixteen Points This text was adopted at a session of the Central Committee on August 8, 1966. With a certain genius it stages the fundamental contradiction of the endeavor called “Cultural Revolution.” One sign of