Class Divides and Cultural Revolutions
“When I compare the present moment in the US to China’s Cultural Revolution, it’s not from the perspective of a defender of capitalism or the status quo. It’s from a perspective that seeks class abolition and complete social revolution, not just cultural radicalism.”
From Lorenzo Raymond
“Black folks with money have always tended to support candidates who they believed would protect their financial interests. As far as I was concerned, it didn’t take too much brains to figure out that Black people are oppressed because of class as well as race, because we are poor and because we are Black.”
— Assata: An Autobiography
It is a hot day in June of 2020. At a Brooklyn protest associated with “Black Lives Matter”, I join in with a group of African-American women as they lead the crowd, call-and-response style, in a chant you may be familiar with:
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.-
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
When we’re done, the phrase “It is our duty to win” stays with me for the rest of the night. It lingers because this is a strange sentiment to hear in the context of 21st century radicalism. Winning is a concept that, while not free of morality, is free of moralism. Contemporary leftism has adopted the doctrine of “prefigurative politics,” and while there are numerous high-minded ways of summarizing the this ideal, it is essentially a way of saying “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game." [1]
Up until recently, the theory of prefiguration was so ingrained that it amounted to a form of pacifism—A less violent world could never be attained through violent means, we were told. In her influential 2011 essay “Throwing Out the Master’s Tools and Building a Better House,” Rebecca Solnit used Audre Lorde’s famous prefigurative metaphor (“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”) to dismiss property destruction and fighting cops from the repertoire of the Occupy movement.
That level of absolutist idealism has been discarded, thankfully. Working-class Blacks in Ferguson rejected utopian nonviolence, leading the anti-policing movement to new heights in 2014 ; critiques of state murder have remained prominent due to fiery insurrections like Baltimore and Kenosha. But idealist fundamentalism maintains its stranglehold on the social justice movement in another way—the prioritizing of cultural revolution over materialist class revolution.
Cultural revolutions can be historic, of course. From the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire to the explosion of the Red Guards in China, they’ve left a mark on the world. Yet the question remains: In the long-term, do they benefit the masses of people in whose name they are done, and do they truly hurt the elite whom they’re supposed to be targeting? In other words, do they bring us any closer to winning?
“Of all our studies,” Malcolm X often said, “history is best qualified to reward our research.” Let us look at some. In Rome, the viciously persecuted Christians managed to shift culture to the point where much of the elite, and eventually Emperor Constantine himself, championed their cause. The Roman establishment converted to Christianity and enabled the faithful in tearing down the pagan statues that represented their oppression. Yet outside of this, little positive happened in the lives of the masses. Constantine’s militarism was bolstered by his Christianity (indeed, in his religious vision, he saw a cross over a battlefield accompanied by the words, “by this, conquer.") Scholar Michele Salzman notes that the emperor’s “Christian appointees…were of the same status as their pagan peers, that is from old, established senatorial families.” The anti-authoritarian aspects of Christianity were degraded as it became wedded to the state. Roman masses often fought among themselves in bloody riots over heresy while Constantine and his heirs established a new family dynasty. And slavery continued. [2]
Some classical scholars promoted a myth that Christianity brought down Rome, but modern historians agree that the Western empire was crumbling well before the Constantinian shift. In fact, the cultural revolution seems to have given imperialism a new lease on life: the Christian leaders established Constantinople and Byzantium—the “New Rome” in eastern Europe. The Byzantine Empire lasted nearly a thousand years and helped launch the Crusades.
How does this relate to Black Lives Matter? Going against expectations, the elite increasingly embraces the movement and frames it in capitalist terms to the point where the CEO of JP Morgan Chase publicly “took a knee” for the victims of police brutality. Repulsive companies like Walmart and Amazon, known for exploiting the labor of people of color and directly busting unions, do everything they can to buy in to the struggle, donating millions to “antiracist” NGOs. It’s not clear if their accompanying policy reforms help the Black masses at all, but we do know that for newly woke investment bank BlackRock Inc., the changes do not include dropping their investments in private prisons. [3]
The corporations’ allies in government have taken up the cultural aspects of the cause as well. Republican senators and military commanders are moving to rename all US bases that currently honor Confederate leaders. Congressional Democrats, of course, went full cultural nationalist, wrapping themselves in African Kente cloths for their post-George Floyd press conference. This is the same congress that refuses to give us Medicare for All or consistent anti-poverty relief but does funnel trillions of dollars to the big banks. Would Assata Shakur, a committed anti-imperialist who considers socialist Cuba to be a noble society, consider that winning?
One of the main justifications for rioting as a revolutionary tactic is to wage economic warfare, yet the stock market, which rises with the fortunes of the largest companies, prospered more than ever during the summer uprising. (Contrast this with the results of a material revolutionary victory like the end of the Vietnam War in 1973-74, where the stock market crashed. The completion of the New Deal in 1937 also lowered stocks.) To the extent that elite dividends have leveled out, it’s because the 1% thinks congress isn’t doing enough to stimulate consumer consumption. The neoliberal version of antiracism has been great for 21st century business, and it’s certain to expand. [4] The notion of American capitalism thriving without white supremacy may seem absurd, but then so did the idea of Romans renouncing centuries of paganism to prosper under the banner of a despised Jewish sect.
Analogies to China’s Cultural Revolution may seem spurious given how many comparisons have been made by right-wing pundits (as well as The New Yorker’s retaliatory comparisons between Trump and Mao). But partisans are clearly working from a cartoon version of Chinese history; The actual “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” was not primarily a massacre by student-led movements, it was a civil conflict with multiple sides. Recent scholarship shows that in fact the majority of casualties were the Red Guards and their allies. [5]
At their inception, the Red Guards sincerely wanted to advance radical collectivism and eliminate capitalism in China. They took their cues for how to accomplish this from Mao Zedong, since they credited him with the success of the 1949 revolution. They allowed Mao’s faction of the elite to frame this as a cultural revolt that would leave the Communist Party intact, as well as most of the economy. Statues were toppled, curriculums were reformed, commissars were displaced, and radical slogans filled the air. But the party kept all activity within narrow cultural confines. When Zhou Enlai was confronted with complaints about deprivation of workers and peasants, his response was to denounce their grievances as “economism.” “Oppose economism” quickly became an official Red Guard slogan. [6]
As leading China historian Andrew Walder notes, the “temporary and contract workers” who helped begin the rebellion in 1966 were not allowed to define “the main lines of factional division, and their self-interested [economic] demands were repudiated in 1967 and their movements were suppressed.” The Chinese elite sidelined policy issues and populist demands with the “regime’s practice of categorizing individuals based on their family background.” A person’s class “heritage” came to define her identity to an almost racialized extent. As this culture of collective blaming spread out to the countryside, it led to chaotic and bloody feuding by civilian neighbor against civilian neighbor. But the Red Guards were not involved in this. In fact, the grassroots left tried to minimize the importance of family class categories. According to Walder, a “famous manifesto that denounced the system of class labels generated widespread support, but it was denounced as reactionary by the elite sponsors of the rebel movement who were close to Mao Zedong…the issue hardly figured at all in the much larger and more influential Red Guard movement in the universities.”
On both the left and right we hear talk of protest movements being managed by elite actors—Not only is there the antisemitic legend of George Soros as prime instigator of the George Floyd rebellion, there is also the claim made by Susan Rice and other Democratic operatives that the uprising is being administered by Vladimir Putin. Neither of those narratives have a basis in reality, but the phenomenon of elites taking control of insurgencies for their own opportunistic purposes is well established. Walder explains that:
“Under certain circumstances, those who are privileged in the existing order will find it in their interest to form rebel groups and join in attacks on powerful officials, and even to oust them from power—precisely in order to protect their positions. To do so they may willingly align themselves with rebels that express grievances against the existing order…The connections between interests and political choices are defined by context…The social and political characteristics of members of a group provide little guidance to context-specific choices [on who to support]” [7]
The uncharacteristic apologies for the uprising made by CNN, NPR and other big media outlets indicate such a self-interested choice. Trump’s tariffs have cut into the business plans of some of the most powerful corporations in the world like Apple, Walmart and Costco, who have only narrowly avoided losses so far due to constant parrying with the president. [8] [9] They predicted that his trade policy would lead to US unemployment, but it did the opposite by 2019, damaging the companies’ credibility. These businesses which torment their workers all over the world and profit off of minerals mined by children in Africa are not endorsing human rights out of empathy or responsibility, but out of a turf war among the ruling class.
With the refusal of Washington to relieve the worst economic crisis in 80 years, and the denial of the Democratic nomination to the popular progressive Bernie Sanders, a radical rebellion was to be expected. The elite was thoroughly poised to step in front of the moving parade and steer it away from a direction that could threaten their wealth. As Black Lives Matter activist Andray Domise put it, this rebellion built on anti-capitalism and working-class power was diverted into “a diversity job fair” for African-Americans in the professional managerial class. [10]
Andrew Walder also notes that the Chinese “rebels who seized power lacked the ability to enforce their claims—whether they were coalitions of popular insurgents and cadre rebels or cadre rebels who acted alone.” Thus the elite leaders were willing to stand down and let them take limited local control, knowing that they did not have enough weapons or organization hold territory for long. Cultural chaos was tolerable as long as “the disorder did not undermine the planned economy, public order and national security.”
Once Mao’s faction had purged the party elite of its designated scapegoat Liu Shaoq, it unleashed the military on the Red Guards and restored absolute CCP control. Typical was the fate of the “April 22 faction” of the Red Guards who’d overthrown the city government of Nanning after the CCP called on students to emulate the model of the Paris Commune. By July 1967, the CCP was calling the Nanning rebels “counter-revolutionaries” and demanding they cede control to party appointees. The Red Guards refused and the army began shelling the downtown area. The April 22 Faction stood their ground, so the army moved on to surface-to-surface missiles. The rifles and Molotov cocktails of the rebels were no match for such an assault and over a thousand were killed. 2300 were later executed. [11]
And yet with all this militancy and bloodshed, and all the upheaval among the bureaucracy and the petit bourgeoisie, no lasting wins for the masses emerged. Within a decade, China was turning toward the free market. The long-term effects were even more tragic: At the next attempted revolution, Tianamen Square in 1989, most of the students wanted more capitalism, not less, marginalizing the socialist workers who came to join them. Radical collectivism had been completely discredited by the Red Guards’ fiasco.
When I compare the present moment in the US to China’s Cultural Revolution, it’s not from the perspective of a defender of capitalism or the status quo. It’s from a perspective that seeks class abolition and complete social revolution, not just cultural radicalism. I oppose the strategy not because it deviates from Marxist orthodoxy, but because it deviates from anything that’s ever improved the material conditions of oppressed people.
There is evidence that experienced revolutionaries understand the limits of cultural revolt. Black liberation political prisoner Jalil Mutaqim recently released his first communique since being approved for parole. He writes:
While it is heartening to see young people, especially Black Lives Matter advocates, protest in the streets challenging the impunity of police repression and racist violence, demanding the tearing down of symbols of white supremacy, it should be noted these demands are readily adopted by the system of oppression to preserve its existence and capacity to exploit the American worker. [12]
Mutaqim’s points echo those of Marxist political scientist and labor organizer Adolph Reed Jr. Reed was recently censured as a “class reductionist,” by the Black Socialist Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America NYC. The caucus wrote that “The greatest flaw in Reed's logic is the idea that racism is a byproduct of capitalism,” and blamed this error on the academic’s liberal tendencies. Needless to say this explanation doesn’t apply to Mutaqim, a former commander of the Black Liberation Army, a radical guerilla formation associated with the Black Panther Party.
The Black Socialist Caucus believe that Reed and Mutaqim have it backwards, and that capitalism is largely a byproduct of white supremacy. The caucus claimed that “Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism does an excellent job showing racism emerged long before capitalism in medieval Christian Europe.”[13] But this is a severe misreading of Robinson who actually wrote that various racisms emerged in the late middle ages from “the racial fabrications concealing the Slavs (the slaves), the Irish and others” and this paralleled “the rise of Italian capitalism” (from which Christopher Columbus emerged). [14] As Pan-Africanist scholar Walter Rodney pointed out, it is a myth “that Europeans enslaved Africans for racist reasons. European planters and miners enslaved Africans for economic reasons.” [15] Conflating all racism with white supremacy is an error. Most historical evidence affirms the Rodney, Reed, and Mutaqim position that capitalists developed first racial division generally, and later white supremacy specifically, as methods of top-down class war. This is why Mutaqim laments that BLM is merely an “‘anti-racism social consciousness movement’ and not an ‘anti-capitalist workers’ movement.” He concludes: “I am not confident these struggles by young people will result in substantial institutional changes or concrete changes in the corporate culture and reality of capitalist profiteering.”
It’s worth remembering that a very similar US cultural revolution took place with the “Afrocentric” wave that began in the late 1980s. Here anti-police action by the Black working-class in events like the Miami riot of 1989 and the Los Angeles rebellion of 1992, was diverted into a purely cultural Black pride movement. It produced some great Public Enemy and Ice Cube records (and the beginning of intersectional and critical race theory) but the political results were tragically underwhelming; the War on Drugs continued its rampage with the notorious 1994 crime bill. The pernicious influence of cultural nationalists like Louis Farrakhan developed a deep hold on the movement and likely inspired its most counterproductive moments like the near murder of white trucker Reginald Denny and embarrassing gestures of support for OJ Simpson. The largest demonstration of this movement, Farrakhan’s Million Man March, was thoroughly Afrocentric but almost completely depoliticized. Today’s antiracists commend themselves for rejecting Farrakhan’s patriarchy, but they need to ask themselves if they’ve really transcended his narrow nationalism, especially since the greatest strides against mass incarceration took place during the less racially-centered anti-capitalist/anti-globalization wave of the early 2000s.
The politics of prefiguration suppose that if we visualize the optics of the post-revolutionary world, that world will come into being: Socialism will not have monuments to slave holders, or individually owned small businesses, so whenever we remove the monuments or local shops, we are realizing socialism. Yet it’s not that simple. The corporate state can thrive regardless of iconography—Under Barack Obama, Harriet Tubman’s face was nearly installed on the $20 bill, replacing Andrew Jackson. One of the largest Dow Jones spikes of the year took place on June 2nd, the day the rebellion went national, even as retail stores burned.
We can debate the particulars of what type of organization will end mass exploitation and oppression in the US, but it will be clearly be based in materialism, and focused on taking direct economic control of lives. As for cultural revolution, I don’t challenge its dominance because I fear it will destroy Western Civilization, I challenge it because I fear that it will ultimately perpetuate it.
Endnotes
Uri Gordon, “Prefigurative politics between ethical practice and absent promise.” Political Studies, https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717722363
Michele Renee Salzman “Constantine and the Roman Senate”.
Robert B. Reich, “Corporations track records on race don’t match public statements against discrimination”, Baltimore Sun.
Sarah Hansen “The Stock Market Doesn’t Care About Violence. Here’s How It’s Performed During Major U.S. Protests And Tragedies” Forbes.
Melissa de Witte, “China’s Cultural Revolution was a power grab from within the government, not from without, Stanford sociologist finds”.
“Chapter 5” in Liu Shaoqi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution by Lowell Dittmer.
Agents of Disorder: Inside China’s Cultural Revolution by Andrew G. Walder , 9-13.
Nathaniel Myerson, “First on CNN Business: 600 companies including Walmart, Costco and Target warn Trump on tariffs”.
Russel Brandom, “Tim Cook personally lobbied US tariff chief as China tariffs loomed”.
“Andray Domise and the BLM Protests” - System Update with Glenn Greenwald, Jul 30, 2020.
Agents of Disorder: Inside China’s Cultural Revolution by Andrew G. Walder.
Jalil Muntaqim,“Future focused in Black August 2020,” August 29, 2020.
DSA AfroSocialist and Socialists of Color Caucus official statement, “Reed response Covid-19, Demand to debate Reed”; See also, Class Unity, “Spiraling Anti-Marxism in the DSA”.
Black Marxism by Cedric Johnson, p. 4.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney, p. 103.
“Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the Transnational Prison-Industrial Complex” by Julia Sudbury, New Social Movements in the African Diaspora.
Lorenzo Raymond
is an independent historian and educator living in New York City. His work has appeared in The New Inquiry, Counterpunch, and Black Agenda Report. He blogs at Patreon.