Žižek on Mao

"Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of Misrule"

by Slavoj Žižek
Please see the full article at
http://www.lacan.com/zizmaozedong.htm
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It is ONLY this reference to what happens AFTER the revolution, to the "morning after," that allows us to distinguish between libertarian pathetic outbursts and true revolutionary upheavals: these upheavals lose their energy when one has to approach the prosaic work of social reconstruction - at this point, lethargy sets in. In contrast to it, recall the immense creativity of the Jacobins just prior to their fall, the numerous proposals about new civic religion, about how to sustain the dignity of old people, and so on. Therein also resides the interest of reading the reports about daily life in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, with the enthusiastic urge to invent new rules for quotidian existence: how does one get married? What are the new rules of courting? How does one celebrate a birthday? How does one get buried?... [25]

At this point, the Cultural Revolution miserably failed. It is difficult to miss the irony of the fact that Badiou, who adamantly opposes the notion of act as negative, locates the historical significance of the Maoist Cultural Revolution precisely in the negative gesture of signaling "the end of the party-State as the central production of revolutionary political activity" - it is here that he should have been consequent and deny the evental status of the Cultural Revolution: far from being an Event, it was rather a supreme display of what Badiou likes to refer to as the "morbid death drive." Destroying old monuments was not a true negation of the past, it was rather an impotent passage à l'acte bearing witness to the failure to get rid of the past.

So, in a way, there is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that the final result of Mao's Cultural Revolution is today's unheard-of explosion of capitalist dynamics in China. That is to say, with the full deployment of capitalism, especially today's "late capitalism," it is the predominant "normal" life itself which, in a way, gets "carnivalized," with its constant self-revolutionizing, with its reversals, crises, reinventions. Brian Massumi formulated clearly this deadlock, which is based on the fact that today's capitalism already overcame the logic of totalizing normality and adopted the logic of the erratic excess:

the more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normalcy starts to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen. This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalism's dynamic. It's not a simple liberation. It's capitalism's own form of power. It's no longer disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it's capitalism's power to produce variety - because markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective tendencies are okay - as long as they pay. Capitalism starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but only in order to extract surplus-value. It hijacks affect in order to intensify profit potential. It literally valorises affect. The capitalist logic of surplus-value production starts to take over the relational field that is also the domain of political ecology, the ethical field of resistance to identity and predictable paths. It's very troubling and confusing, because it seems to me that there's been a certain kind of convergence between the dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance. [26]

There IS thus, beyond all cheap jibes and superficial analogies, a profound structural homology between the Maoist permanent self-revolutionizing, the permanent struggle against the ossification of State structures, and the inherent dynamics of capitalism. One is tempted to paraphrase here Brecht, his "What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?", yet again: what are the violent and destructive outbursts of a Red Guardist caught in the Cultural Revolution compared to the true Cultural Revolution, the permanent dissolution of all life-forms necessitated by the capitalist reproduction? It is the reign of today's global capitalism which is the true Lord of Misrule. No wonder, then, that, in order to curb the excess of social disintegration caused by the capitalist explosion, Chinese officials not celebrate religions and traditional ideologies which sustain social stability, from Buddhism to Confucianism, i.e., the very ideologies that were the target of the Cultural Revolution. In April 2006, Ye Xiaowen, China's top religious official, told the Xinhua News Agency that "religion is one of the important forces from which China draws strength," and he singled out Buddhism for its 'unique role in promoting a harmonious society," the official formula for combining economic expansion with social development and care; the same week, China hosted the World Buddhist Forum. [27] The role of religion as the force of stability against the capitalist dynamics is thus officially sanctioned - what is bothering Chinese authorities in the case of sects like Falun Gong is merely their independence from the state control. (This is why one should also reject the argument that Cultural Revolution strengthened socialist attitudes among the people and thus helped to curb the worst disintegrative excesses of today's capitalist development: quite on the contrary, by undermining traditional stabilizing ideologies like Confucianism, it rendered the people all the more vulnerable to the destabilizing effects of capitalism.)

This capitalist reappropriation of the revolutionary dynamics is not without its comic side-effects. It was recently made public that, in order to conceptualize the IDF urban warfare against the Palestinians, the IDF military academies systematically refer to Deleuze and Guattari, especially to Thousand Plateaux, using it as "operational theory" - the catchwords used are "Formless Rival Entities", "Fractal Manoeuvre", "Velocity vs. Rhythms", "The Wahabi War Machine", "Postmodern Anarchists", "Nomadic Terrorists". One of the key distinctions they rely on is the one between "smooth" and "striated" space, which reflect the organizational concepts of the "war machine" and the "state apparatus". The IDF now often uses the term "to smooth out space" when they want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. Palestinian areas are thought of as "striated" in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, road blocks and so on:

The attack conducted by units of the IDF on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as "inverse geometry", which he explained as "the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions". During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of overground tunnels carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring simultaneously in the city, they were so "saturated" into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city's streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as "infestation", seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF's strategy of "walking through walls" involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare "a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux. [28]

So what does it follow from all this? Not, of course, the nonsensical accusation of Deleuze and Guattari as theorists of militaristic colonization - but the conclusion that the conceptual machine articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, far from being simply "subversive," also fits the (military, economic, and ideologico-political) operational mode of today's capitalism. - How, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant self-revolutionizing? This, perhaps, is THE question today, and this is the way one should REPEAT Mao, re-inventing his message to the hundreds of millions of the anonymous downtrodden, a simple and touching message of courage: "Bigness is nothing to be afraid of. The big will be overthrown by the small. The small will become big." The same message of courage sustains also Mao's (in)famous stance towards a new atomic world war:

We stand firmly for peace and against war. But if the imperialists insist on unleashing another war, we should not be afraid of it. Our attitude on this question is the same as our attitude towards any disturbance: first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it. The First World War was followed by the birth of the Soviet Union with a population of 200 million. The Second World War was followed by the emergence of the socialist camp with a combined population of 900 million. If the imperialists insist on launching a third world war, it is certain that several hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be much room left on earth for the imperialists.

It is all too easy to dismiss these lines as empty posturing of a leader ready to sacrifice millions for his political goals (the extension ad absurdum of Mao's ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death in the late 1950s) - the other side of this dismissive attitude is the basic message: "we should not be afraid." Is this not the only correct attitude apropos war: "first, we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it"? There is definitely something terrifying about this attitude - however, this terror is nothing less than the condition of freedom.

Notes:
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[25] Was Che Guevara's withdrawal from all official functions, even from Cuban citizenship, in 1965, in order to dedicate himself to world revolution - this suicidal gesture of cutting the links with the institutional universe - really an ACT? Or, was it an escape from the impossible task of the positive construction of socialism, from remaining faithful to the CONSEQUENCES of the revolution, namely, an implicit admission of failure?

[26] Brian Massumi, "Navigating Movements," in Hope, ed. Mary Zournazi, New York: Routledge 2002, p. 224.

[27] See the report "Renewed Faith," Time, May 8 2006, p. 34-35.

[28] Eyal Weizman, "Israeli Military Using Post-Structuralism as 'Operational Theory'," available online at www.frieze.com.