By Liu Jiming · May 20, 2023 · Source: Red Song Society Network (Honggeshi)

At the advanced age of 95 and shortly after being discharged from the hospital, Elder Gu (veteran soldier of the New Fourth Army, Gu Zhenghua—Author's note) delivered a brilliant, uninterrupted report on the domestic and international situation that lasted nearly an hour. In Elder Gu, we witnessed an exuberant fighting will and an unyielding revolutionary spirit. Today, such will and spirit can likely only be found among the older generation who lived through the Cultural Revolution and the Mao era, such as Wei Wei and Elder Gu.

Just now, Elder Gu remarked that Wuhan is a city with a glorious revolutionary tradition. From the liberation of Wuhan in 1949 to the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, Elder Gu was both an active participant and a firsthand witness. Back then, it was Elder Gu who hoisted the first Five-Starred Red Flag atop the Wuhan Customs House. (Parenthetically, a character in my recently completed novel Black and White is modeled directly on Elder Gu.) During the Cultural Revolution, Wuhan stood as a pivotal center second only to Shanghai. In the post-Mao era, Wuhan was home to two figures hailed as representatives of the so-called "ultra-left": the celebrated veteran novelist Yao Xueyin, author of the historical novel Li Zicheng, and Comrade Li Erchong, a veteran writer and former provincial leader of Hubei. Elder Gu, who participated in editing the journal Zhongliu (Midstream) alongside chief editor Wei Wei, stands as another key representative.

May 16 marks both the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Wuhan and the 57th anniversary of the release of the "May 16 Circular." Every year on this date, various forms of grassroots commemorative gatherings take place across Wuhan. While Wuhan’s liberation is unquestionably recognized as part of revolutionary culture, whether the "May 16 Circular" belongs to revolutionary culture remains deeply contested. The two historical resolutions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China characterized the Cultural Revolution as an upheaval devoid of progressive historical significance. Yet Chairman Mao reflected that he accomplished two monumental feats in his lifetime: founding the New China, and launching the Cultural Revolution. He clearly regarded the Cultural Revolution as carrying immense historical significance on par with the birth of the People's Republic. That being the case, our commemoration and study of the Cultural Revolution—just like our remembrance of the founding of New China—is fully legitimate and necessary.

Where, then, does the profound significance of the Cultural Revolution lie?

The year before last, in my presentation at Tsinghua University's academic workshop on "Culture and Revolution in the Short Twentieth Century," I noted: "Within the grand narrative of the Chinese Revolution, the Cultural Revolution was the continuation of the 1949 Revolution. One could even say that 1949 was the cause of 1966, and 1966 was the consequence of 1949. Without 1949, there would be no 1966; conversely, without 1966, 1949 would have lost its navigational orientation and its 'grand communist ideals.'" The Cultural Revolution sought to resolve the worldwide dilemma of the revolutionary "day after." Yet perhaps because it exerted excessive force, like a booster rocket that exhausts its propellant before hoisting its payload into designated orbit, it failed to reach its destination. This may well be a primary cause behind the failure of the Cultural Revolution. In the view of certain Western leftists, the Cultural Revolution explored the question of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat—a core theoretical contribution by Chairman Mao to Marxism-Leninism and the international communist movement, and the very essence of Maoism. They argue that the Cultural Revolution was both a magnificent revolution and a failed one. Its failure cannot negate its greatness, nor can its greatness obscure its failure. Just as the French Revolution met eventual defeat, its failure does not diminish its status as the most momentous bourgeois revolution in human history.

Current mainstream discourse advocates the promotion of "traditional culture" and "revolutionary culture," yet does so in overly generalized terms. From a Marxist standpoint, no revolution exists in the abstract: there are bourgeois revolutions and proletarian revolutions, violent revolutions, political revolutions, social revolutions, and cultural revolutions. The former designates the purpose and nature of a revolution; the latter refers to its structural form. The same holds true for traditional culture: Laozi, Confucius, Xunzi, Daoism, Confucianism, and Legalism are traditional culture, but do the peasant rebellions led by Chen Sheng, Wu Guang, Li Zicheng, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom not also belong to traditional culture? To any ruling clique, all revolutions constitute rebellion and the subversion of an established political and cultural order; in this sense, peasant uprisings belong firmly to "revolutionary culture." Thus, so-called traditional culture possesses inherent class character. There exists bourgeois traditional culture, just as there exists proletarian traditional culture. The absolute core of Marxism is revolution—more precisely, proletarian revolution. Anyone who avoids or actively opposes revolution and proletarian emancipation is not a genuine Marxist. It was precisely when confronting revisionists of every stripe who advocated class reconciliation and denied class struggle that Karl Marx famously remarked: "If that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist."

As an ideological current, revisionism has shadowed the international communist movement and the socialist cause from the inception of Marxism onward—from Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, through the Soviet revisionist cliques represented by Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev, down to the era of "Reform and Opening-Up." In each historical phase, the outward manifestations of revisionism may have varied, but their common thread has always been the restoration of capitalism. The late writer Wei Wei delivered a razor-sharp refutation of the "makeup lesson theory" (the idea that China must catch up on capitalist development) that swept mainstream Chinese intellectual circles:

"For a long period, a widely propagated revisionist notion has been the 'makeup lesson theory'—namely, the argument that socialist states must go back to complete the missed coursework of capitalism. Their premise is that existing socialist states, such as Russia and China, were originally economically and culturally backward countries where capitalism had not fully matured. They argue that socialist revolutions in these lands were historical aberrations that ought not to have occurred, mere 'premature' or 'deformed' infants (an argument inherited directly from their ideological ancestor, Karl Kautsky). Consequently, returning to complete this developmental lesson is framed as an indispensable phase. This is the so-called 'premature birth' and 'makeup lesson' thesis. The widespread circulation of this theory in our country is by no means accidental; it is nothing more than an alibi concocted by those infatuated with capitalism to reject socialism and restore bourgeois relations."

Regrettably, Wei Wei’s warnings failed to awaken widespread vigilance. Since the turn of the new century, this developmentalist logic has shed its neoliberal garb to reemerge as the prevailing ideological orthodoxy in the form of statism and great-power nationalism. Many left-wing intellectuals have joined this swelling chorus. These individuals are referred to as the "nationalist left" (minzuo), who exist alongside a wing of "academic leftists." Their theoretical apparatus draws heavily upon Western Marxism, as exemplified by Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida, as well as neo-Marxist world-systems frameworks represented by Immanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin. In their assessment, following the defeat of the Cultural Revolution and the global retreats of socialism, Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theories of proletarian revolution and class struggle have lost their validity and can no longer guide world transformation. Consequently, they attempt to seek solutions from within the global capitalist architecture, most notably through Amin’s paradigm of "core countries," "peripheral countries," and "dependency theory."

Amin posited that the "capitalist world-system" represents what Vladimir Lenin described as the imperialist stage of capitalism, into which all contemporary socio-economic formations have been integrated. In this unequal world-system dominated by advanced core nations, micro-level relations between developed and underdeveloped societies manifest as an unconscious and asymmetrical transfer of value. Across the "core-periphery" hierarchy, peripheral countries continuously siphon unrenewable raw materials, cheap labor-power, and primary industrial inputs toward the core; in exchange, core states channel high-value tech commodities and manufactured assets to the periphery. Through this unequal exchange, surplus capital accumulates in the center, consolidating the core's dominance and facilitating structural exploitation, while peripheral countries are systematically stripped of autonomous development and locked into structural dependency. Amin argued that for peripheral regions to achieve sovereign modernization, they must "delink" from the capitalist world-system and escape this asymmetric structure. He asserted that the only path toward true delinking lies in breaking free from core-periphery mechanisms through socialist revolution and a self-reliant socialist trajectory. Only through this rupture can countries reject the unequal global division of labor. Amin maintained that peripheral nations could pursue this path through a managed transitional framework: by articulating global socialist targets beyond narrow economic output, and by expanding public ownership while raising popular standards of living and domestic technological autonomy. By binding these tasks to endow the state with popular socialist content, peripheral formations could navigate a transition toward socialism, provided developmental strategies were integrated with specific national conditions.

While the core-periphery paradigm offers an analytical model for interpreting capitalist globalization, its solutions remain confined within the horizon of the capitalist world-system. The "socialism" it outlines frequently amounts to state socialism or state capitalism, diverging fundamentally from Marx’s vision of proletarian socialism. The mechanisms proposed by Amin and kindred neo-Marxists do not rely on class struggle or proletarian revolution, but on technocratic "delinking" and structural "transition." In doing so, they arrive at the same destination as early reformists like Kautsky; rather than representing a new Marxist breakthrough, this framework is better understood as a revised variant of reformist revisionism.

Neo-Marxism not only dominates the "academic left," but also serves as the ideological reservoir for contemporary Chinese nationalism and statism. Its central flaw lies in overemphasizing the external extraction of peripheral states by core powers while overlooking the domestic class dynamic: that this global extraction stems from severe contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat within imperialist states, which compel capital to export its crises abroad. By obscuring the reality that domestic class contradictions within peripheral societies often cut far deeper than inter-national friction, this school mistakes national friction for the primary contradiction. For many academic leftists, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is treated merely as a subject of scholastic research, while neo-Marxist dependency and delinking theories serve as their favored blueprints for social engineering—frameworks that are, in essence, programs for piecemeal social reform.

Within the broader left, the debate between revolution and reform has a long history. Academic leftists refuse to concede this distinction; in fact, they often exhibit a dread of revolution that exceeds that of conventional liberals. Many among them treat the Cultural Revolution merely as an archival relic. They bracket off Chairman Mao’s revolutionary theses—such as "it is right to rebel," combating revisionism, and continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat—preferring instead to obsess over minor historical arcana. This antiquarian approach dominates much of independent Cultural Revolution research. Many discuss the Cultural Revolution with impassioned rhetoric when debating historical legitimacy, yet the moment their analysis touches upon contemporary domestic reality or international geopolitical affairs, they lapse into the assumptions of statism, nationalism, and class reconciliation. This contradiction exists not only among academic leftists, but also among self-identified "Mao-leftists" or "Cultural Revolution leftists." Borrowing Lu Xun's phrase, such figures can be characterized as "empty theorists."

For a long time, the left has been paralyzed by these empty theories, leaving it unable to connect with social realities and mired in internal fractures. Yet the root cause of the left's continuing marginalization and weakness does not stem from a simple "lack of unity," as many complain, but from the absence of a defined revolutionary subject. Historical practice has demonstrated that the traditional industrial working class and peasantry have been atomized, while the vacillating intelligentsia is structurally incapable of serving as a revolutionary vanguard. As a young online commentator observed: "The absence of a revolutionary subject is the foremost crisis confronting the contemporary left. The history of the modern left has been a search for an elusive revolutionary subject: one faction waits passively for the emergence of an ideal 'conscious working class' that never materializes, while the other exhausts itself searching for substitute agents without success, leaving both sides locked in endless, futile polemics."

Nonetheless, this impasse does not imply that revolution has been permanently retired. In any historical era, as long as systems of human exploitation and social oppression persist, the underlying conditions and driving forces for revolution do not disappear. Though old revolutionary subjects may disperse, new revolutionary subjects will inevitably crystallize amid recurring capitalist crises and severe class polarization. Just as concrete historical struggles produced the theoretical corpus of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, new revolutionary subjects and struggles will bring forth their own theorists. For the working class, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism remains an indispensable theoretical weapon in the struggle for emancipation, distinct from convoluted and detached academic theorizing.

A few days ago, a job posting circulated across Chinese social media: a domestic service agency in Shanghai was recruiting a private maid at a monthly salary of 140,000 yuan, explicitly requiring "kneeling service" comparable to that rendered by ancient household bondservants. The aristocratic young masters and landlords of the past have returned, and the logic that "exploitation is justified" has gained widespread social acceptance. The concepts of "the rich" and "the poor"—categories once dismantled by the socialist revolution—have returned in full force, stratifying society into polarized divisions that are widely rationalized as natural and inevitable. A century ago, commitment to socialism and communism was regarded as progressive; today, it is dismissed by many as eccentric or "reactionary." Society has not merely reverted to conditions preceding the revolution, but to conditions preceding the pre-revolutionary era itself. Some observe, with bitter irony, that it is as though Marx, Lenin, and Mao had never existed, and as if the revolutions of the "short twentieth century"—which transformed the destinies of oppressed classes and reshaped world geopolitics—had never occurred.

The cultural scholar Dai Jinhua remarked: "History is the inventory of the victors." For the bourgeoisie and its intellectual retainers, this is an era of celebration; for the proletariat, it marks a protracted, unyielding winter. Intellectuals who were remolded into members of the working class during the first thirty years of the People's Republic have cast aside their coarse denim work clothes to don bourgeois vestments. When certain academics present a left-leaning posture, they tend to brandish a sanitized, reformist Marxism severed from Marx’s revolutionary commitments; to them, authentic Marxists are dismissed as outdated "fundamentalists," "ultra-leftists," or "purists."

In the early phase of the Cultural Revolution, the "Shanghai Commune" was briefly established. Its creation was an explicit effort to inherit the legacy of the Paris Commune. The Paris Commune was humanity's first attempt to establish proletarian political power, enduring for merely 72 days from inception to suppression. The foundational principles of the Paris Commune were clear: first, the universal election and revocability of all public officials; second, wage ceilings for public servants pegged to the pay of skilled workers; and third, direct mass supervision and the immediate right of recall. These principles formed the political ideals of generations of proletarian martyrs. The defeat of the Shanghai Commune, tragic though it was, foreshadowed the difficult trajectory of the Cultural Revolution.

The Paris Commune fell; the Cultural Revolution likewise met defeat.

Does this mean the revolution is dead?

In his record of remarks on the Paris Commune, Karl Marx observed: "Even if the Commune is crushed, the struggle is only postponed. The principles of the Commune are eternal and indestructible; they will present themselves again and again until the working class achieves its emancipation."

And so Marx proclaimed: "The Revolution is dead, long live the Revolution!"

(Transcribed and adapted from the author's presentation at the symposium commemorating the 74th anniversary of the liberation of Wuhan and the 57th anniversary of the "May 16 Circular.")