Angel Jaramillo Torres
Under the slogan that education should serve politics, one of the darkest episodes in the history of humankind began. It is worth remembering that some in Mexico seek an indigenous version of the Cultural Revolution.
Mao Tse Tung said that education should serve politics. And so began one of the darkest episodes in the history of humankind: the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
Although there are various interpretations of what caused this upheaval, many analysts agree that it was, in part, Mao’s reaction to what he saw as the growing bureaucratization of communist society in both the Soviet Union and China.
Belgian sinologist Simon Leys, however, has emphasized another terrain. In his view, the Chinese Cultural Revolution had a less intellectual origin: the stark struggle for power within the Chinese elite. Curious that Mao’s concerns about the continuing regulation of life – as if Max Weber were whispering in his ear – occurred while fierce bureaucratic battles for power were being waged in China.
According to Octavio Paz, the Chinese party bureaucracy was just a new incarnation of the Confucian mandarins who had dominated society during various mandates from heaven. Paz understood the Chinese cultural revolution as a time when the communist mandarins were challenged by a Daoist-inspired revolt, an anarchist element that, from time to time, has manifested itself in opposition to the mandarinate literati. In a curious modification of the usual perspective, Mao would have commanded a rebellion of Daoist order, but not from the periphery – as had historically been the case – but from power itself.
The Chinese cultural revolution did not affect the economy’s future -that is why Deng Xiaoping remained in power, despite having been considered an enemy of the cultural revolution- but particularly the political and cultural spheres of society.
Rhetorically, the idea was to eliminate the bourgeois culture that afflicted, according to Mao and his group, the intellectual elite: educators, teachers, and artists. The class struggle had to be radicalized, and for this, the Chinese had to be re-educated based on a new idea of what society should be. The plane of struggle would be the ideological sphere. Against Liu Shaoqi’s economistic position, Mao imagined a revolution of consciences that would affect humanity in a way never seen before. The enemy was “the exploiting classes,” including prominently the intellectuals, who, according to him, had distanced themselves from the people.
For Socrates, in The Republic, a true renewal of society would require getting rid of those over ten years old. Mao, his cultural revolution was aimed at Chinese youth. But if Socrates was being ironic, Mao spoke with a fanatical seriousness.
Ultimately, the Chinese cultural revolution is an example of the anti-enlightenment impulses of the radical left. Thus, in the textbooks circulating among the younger Chinese, discussions of natural sciences, mathematics, and other subjects considered bourgeois were eliminated or reduced to a minimum. It was a veritable assault on reason.
Some historians have said that the Cultural Revolution caused a generation of young Chinese unable to pursue university studies and were thus condemned to poverty, ignorance, and fear.
This disturbing human experience lasted about ten years. It bequeathed nothing positive to Chinese society, although its failure may have resulted in Deng Xiaoping’s great reform that would produce the four modernizations of society. The obscurantist enormity of the Maoist attempt to change the essence of the human being convinced the Chinese to more modestly transform their prosperity paradigm and open their economy to individual initiative. The result has been spectacular, and today, China competes with the United States for world hegemony. But China’s transition to political, economic, and social health will not be complete without what Octavio Paz called the fifth modernization: the democratic one.
It is worth pausing to examine one of the most irrational moments in modern history now that some in Mexico are looking for an autochthonous version of the Cultural Revolution. To them, we should say that irrational rebellion against reason breeds nothing but monsters. ~
This was published in Spanish by Letras Libres on August 9, 2023.
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