Rev Left Radio - On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among The People

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

In this episode of Red Menace, Breht and Alyson dive into Mao Zedong’s pivotal 1957 speech On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People. This foundational text offers insight into Mao���s dialectical approach to politics, particularly in navigating the complex terrain of class struggle within socialist society. Together they explore Mao’s crucial distinction between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, and how this distinction can guide revolutionary praxis. The discussion includes an analysis of the “unity–struggle–unity” dialectic, the historical context and lessons of the Hundred Flowers and Hundred Schools campaigns, and the subsequent Anti-Rightist backlash. They also examine Mao’s critique of Han chauvinism and draw parallels to white chauvinism in the contemporary U.S., as well as Mao's position on Tibet and the historical legacy of how that conflict played out, and how it is still weaponized today. ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio: https://revleftradio.com/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Red Menace. All right, on today's episode, we are going to be talking about the classic Mao text on the correct handling of contradictions among the people. I think a while back, a year, two years, something like that, I did do an episode on this with my friend Matthew Furlong in our Dialectic Deep Dive series. We touched on different things, and we really use that as an opening to talk

about a bunch of other philosophical ideas. And this is going to be, I think, more focused on the text in particular. And, of course, when I revisit a text or an idea or a figure or whatever, I do so without having listened to my previous iteration because I want to come to the text fresh and new. And the way this whole discussion is organized, I think is different from that as well. But we'll be covering this text. And before we do, I'll toss it over to Allison to kind of give some historical context. But importantly, I think what Allison and I want to do is, as always with these texts, is avoid the specific historical minutia and try to pull out the broad themes that apply to us

today and make connections to contemporary political struggle. So, you know, while this text is very much in some sense of its time and its specificity, it's also universally applicable in its broad sweeps. And so we're going to try to, as always, kind of walk that line. We did the same thing with the dialectics of nature episode, and I think the episode was all the better for it. But having said that, it is worth contextualizing it a little bit historically. So, Alison, and you want to give people a basic orientation here? Yeah, I think that's a good start for, like, the framework for approaching this text. And so I will historicize it somewhat for us, and then we can kind of get into what Mao is doing dialectically here, right?

So this text was written in 1957 and was, you know, released during kind of the late middle part of the Hundred Flowers campaign in China. And so the Hundred Flowers campaign was this period of time that went from, uh, 1956 to 1957, in which criticism of the party was very explicitly encouraged. You will find, if you read this text, that Mao explicitly references this campaign, talks about the reasons for it, how the party understood it, what its function was, but this is a text that is released and really has a big impact on actually getting some of that criticism flowing. It's also worth noting that this text comes right at the time where that criticism starts to pick up and gets re-released later on in 1957 in a revised text that actually starts to downplate some of the

criticism towards the party. And the Hundred Flower campaign actually eventually transitions into the anti-rightist campaign, which is this other campaign that moves in a different direction and actually seeks to kind of remove right-wing pro-capitalist elements from the party and kind of undoes some of the openness to criticism that happened in the Hundred Flower campaign. So the re-release of this text kind of also represents this turning point for, okay, well, we got some of what we wanted under the 100 Flowers campaign. We're going to move in this other direction. And so I would argue that this is a text that really represents the complexities of this moment in China. In it, Mao is really encouraging criticism and putting forth the idea that one ought to accept and encourage,

you know, criticism of Marxism, that Marxism is not afraid of criticism. But also represents a point right before China is really going to start to emphasize ideological unity and the necessity of ideological struggle. And obviously, there's an interesting emphasis in this text on despite criticism, one needs to have a political line, and it's necessary to put that forward. And so we'll see how this text actually addresses this idea of movement from unity to criticism and back and forth, because that's in this text. But historically, it ends up situated in this very interesting moment in the development

of socialist China. And so I do want to just kind of frame it there so you can understand some of the context that Mao is going to be referencing while he's kind of doing the application of dialectics that he's doing here. The last thing I'll say is this text is written well after on practice and on contradiction and the ideas in those two, those were originally speeches, but the ideas in those two speeches are extremely present in this text. I think you can really see Mao basically applying a lot of on contradiction to the situation in China in 1957, and there's this very interesting kind of recapping of a lot of the ideas in those earlier texts. So I would highly recommend you look at those texts. You can go listen to our old episodes on them and really kind of

engage with some of Mao's earlier writings about dialectics and practice, because this is sort of those writings applied to a specific political moment. And I think it's really interesting, not just to see, you know, well, what was that political moment, but the technique Mao employs in order to apply those concepts to a moment in a way that I think we can learn to practice ourselves, perhaps. Yeah. And this is why I love Mao. I love the Chinese revolution. It never gets old with regards to studying it and learning from it. It is because there is, and this is true in the Russian Revolution as well, with Lenin, prior things, theory in the lead-up to the actual revolution, then the application of theory, and then

having succeeded the navigating of all the contradictions that emerge post-revolution in a socialist-Marxist context, right? There have been the French Revolution and other revolutions where, you know, people are talking before, during, and after, but this is specifically Marxist. And that's why, as a Marxist, how could you not take so seriously Lenin and Mao and these movements that they are articulating because they are not just sitting in a philosophy department or an armchair or in a small organization thinking about ideas. They are putting them into practice in world historical revolutions with everything on the line. And so when it comes to actually learning about revolution and theory and the dialectic between theory and

praxis. There's no, there's no better figures and movements and histories and revolutions than these because they show us, yeah, before, during, and after with the Marxist land, the application of theory and the navigation of very real contradictions that emerge, which I find endlessly useful. And also the thing about Mao in particular and revolutionary China is this radical openness and embrace of the experimental aspect of Marxism, that these answers are not solved. And they're going to require, you know, real world experimentation.

And the dialectic between the 100 flowers and the 100 schools of thought campaign and then the response in the anti-rightist campaign, right, this sort of opening up and then this clamping down, that's dialectics, that's experimentation. And I'll get into it perhaps a little bit more when I actually cover that section. but a lot of, you know, reactionaries and, you know, anti-communists will say the 100 flowers and the 100 school of thought campaign were just traps set by Mao and the communist elite to see who would speak out so then they could crack down and bust skulls. And that's just not the case. See, this was a genuine, well-intentioned effort to experiment. And then the dialect, the pendulum swings too far in one direction. And whether you agree or disagree, we can get into the actual nuances of this later. But, you know,

Then there has to be a sort of response to that over, that over swinging of the pendulum. And similar things with the cultural revolution occurred, similar things with the Great Leap Forward occurred, right? The Great Leap Forward as presented by anti-communists is this horrific display of socialist incompetence and communist cruelty and the disconcern for the lives of regular people. It wasn't that at all. It was a genuine attempt to revolutionize and progress their society from the bottom up and the top down. and it had tragic consequences. These are experiments that in some ways succeeded and in other ways failed, but they were never ill-intentioned or coming out of malice or disregard for the people.

And when you read text like this, you realize that the caricature of Mao as this evil dictator is just fucking cartoonish. And reading this stuff, regardless of you agree or disagree, it really sets the record straight on these caricatures. So I wanted to say that up front. I love the point that Allison made about, and again, we'll get into this later, but of Marxism not being afraid of criticism. The opening up, you know, in contrast to anti-communist cliches about Marxism as this repressive, tyrannical, slamming the fist down on anybody who speaks up differently, this is the exact opposite of that. It is an embrace and a standing up of the correctness of Marxism and the confidence in our theory to engage an open dialogue and, debate and persuasion and win out on the merits of the argument. And I believe in that form of Marxism.

And I hope what we do here on Red Menace is equip people who are Marxists, to our socialists, to our communists, to become more and more confident, to put your chin high and say, we know what we stand for. We know how to argue for these ideas. We know what you're going to say to try to dissuade us or to try to destroy us or make us look silly. And we have responses. We are more correct than you.

And that confidence and that swagger, I think, is not only important in its own right, but it's convincing to other people when you don't shy away from open, open debate, all bringers, you know, bring it on. We will take on any enemy and we will do it in debate. We'll do it in struggle. We'll do it in any way you want. We are not scared of conflict whatsoever, and this comes through in this text. But finally, I'll just say this last point. The name of the text is on the correct handling of contradictions among the people. And there is an implicit idea here that we are interested in handling differences of opinions and views and strategies and tactics, whatever, among the people as distinct from the enemy.

And we'll get into who the people are and who they are not. Maybe Allison, you want to touch on that briefly. But I think it's important to keep this in mind because in our own context, we do not want to shrink the pool of who the people are too much. that's a real error but you also don't want to expand it too much to include people who are outright hostile to everything you stand for right and so delineating who the people are and who the enemies are i think is an implicitly crucial part of this text and alison any thoughts yeah yeah i mean we can talk about Mao's answer to who the people are right i think this is worth being very um you know explicit about Mao's engagement with this concept of the people here because this is one of the things that that Mao gets a lot of criticism for and that Maoism, in as much as we can talk about Maoism, also gets quite a lot of criticism for, which is this idea that contained within Mao's ideas and within Maoism more broadly is this overly expansive notion of who the people

is. And you'll often hear Orthodox Marxists, for example, they'll say, well, okay, we're not really interested in the people. We're interested in the proletariat, right? And Mao's doing something broader here. So I think it's worth being explicit about what those criticisms are and trying to wrestle with them a little bit. So, you know, the people, as Mao defines it here, is actually very contextually defined. And I'm going to go ahead and just read a quotation from the text. Mao says that, quote, to understand these two different types of contradictions correctly, we must first be clear on what is meant by the people and what is meant by the enemy. The concept of the people varies in content in different countries and in different periods of

history in a given country. Take our own country, for example, during the war of resistance against Japan, all those classes, strata, and social groups opposing Japanese aggression, came within the category of the people, while the Japanese imperialists, their Chinese collaborators, and the pro-Japanese elements were all enemies of the people. During the War of Liberation, U.S. imperialists and their running dogs, the bureaucratic capitalists, the landlords, and the Kuomintang reactionaries, who represented these two classes were the enemies of the people, while the other classes, strata, and social groups which opposed them, all came within the category of the people. At the present stage, the period of building socialism, the classes, strata, and social groups, which favor, support,

and work for the cause of socialist construction, all come within the category of the people, while the social forces and groups which resist socialist revolution and are hostile to or sabotage socialist construction are all enemies. of the people." End quote. So that is obviously a pretty long quote, but I think the takeaway from it is that Mao's looking at these different moments in the history of China and the Chinese revolution and is recognizing that who the people are and who the enemy changes in certain contexts. This is also a text where we really see Mao develop this notion of what the people means in the context of fights for national liberation. And this is where we see Mao very explicitly say in

national liberation struggle, the national bourgeoisie who are fighting for, you know, national independence can actually be a part of the people alongside the proletariat in this very strange way, which is because of the contradiction that needs to be resolved first in that situation is a national contradiction. And so you can have this understanding of the people that actually includes these groups that in the context of another contradiction have a very antagonistic relationship to each other. And so there's this flexible approach to what the people means here that we see that I think really, you know, reflects a lot of the pragmatism that one finds in Mao and Maoism. And again, there are many people who've put forth a critique of Mao's

idea and have said this is kind of like a cross-class politics. But I do want to, as a just historical point, add that I don't think this is unique to Mao or unique to this text. If you, you know, go back and read what is to be done, one of the things that Lenin makes very clear is that the party needs to be able to lead all of the progressive classes within society, right? The party, even though it is a proletarian party trying to establish proletarian dictatorship, still needs to lead the intellectuals, the progressives within the petty bourgeoisie, and the peasants who are outside of the proletariat proper. So this notion of a broader the people versus the enemy and given contradictions. I would argue you actually really does go back to linen. And Mao is kind of

drawing it out here and expressing it in the context of China and their history and their revolutionary struggle. Yeah. And I think that speaks to the actual complexity of societies, which are not just split between a concrete group called the workers and a concrete group called the owners. There are class strata. There are people within different class strata who have more or less progressive ideas. There are reactionary workers. There are, you know, progressive petty bourgeois types. And so if we actually want to not just think in these really simplistic dualisms, but actually wrestle with the real complexity of a dynamic and constantly evolving society with many different facets and micro facets, then this is the sort of thing

that we have to deal with. And if we have a revolution, you know, in this society, it is not just going to be a simple case of the workers are over here and then the owners are over there and we just like run at each other in clash, no, it's going to be a strategic game of seeing who has interests in the toppling of this order and even those people who do have interest in the toppling of this order then may want very different things to emerge out of it and how do you wrestle with that changing evolving dynamic where in one instance you could be allies and in the very next you turn into enemies and this is something I think that we see even in our own you know sort of milder version because we're not in a revolutionary moment here in the

United States but we see elements of the right shifting on positions like Israel shifting on the military industrial complex shifting on the CIA and the deep state and it's interesting to think about those contradictions and those interestingly interesting dynamic shifts in this context because I think it's going to become increasingly important that we navigate those contradictions and those shifting dynamics well in the coming years as the crises amount and as there is more just disdain among the people as we've seen that growing right right left and center regular people hate this fucking government they're disgusted by the corruption they see the endless war they're they're waking up to you know imperialism

in some sense even if they don't put it in those terms and that's fertile ground for political education agitation and organization but it also comes with a bunch of landmines because um you know one example that jumps to mind is you can listen to um you know what's your name marjorie taylor green and tucker carlson have this interview where they are speaking about apac and israel and the war machine in the deep state in very interesting terms but once you start talking to them about well how would you organize society and and their views on socialism it turns incredibly hostile immediately so how do we you know how do we harness some of that genuine energy against the deep state in the military industrial complex and the u.s imperial apparatus um while also being able to navigate

those those very real tensions and those very real hostilities to everything we ultimately believe in those are the things that real revolutionaries like Mao have to deal with and you know people sitting back and just thinking about these things in merely theoretical terms don't have to deal with and I think that's a big difference yeah yeah no I mean I think that is the huge difference and this is like the thing with this text right is this text is the product of like a concrete revolutionary struggle where the Chinese Communist Party had this very complex back and forth relationship with the nationalist forces in China right and you talk about this transition from enemy to friend and back again, a historical analysis of the history of this revolution will tell you it is just kind of the archetypal story of that relationship to a certain degree, right? And so when you actually have to do the practicalities of revolutionary work, it is hard to sit in the orthodox Marxist abstraction in which everything is very clear. And I think that's what you'll see throughout this text is that Mao is going to really insist socialism, the process of building socialism, is kind of a

fucking mess, honestly, and you are going to go back and forth and try different things and have to re-solution constantly, all of which I think shouldn't be surprising because it's very in line with, you know, Mao's ideas about practice generally. Yes, absolutely. All right, well, let's go ahead and get into it. Yeah, okay, so I'm going to go ahead and start us off talking about one of the earlier ideas that emerges in this text that, you know, again, if you are familiar with Mao at all, you should have some knowledge of, but if not, you can definitely go look at on contradiction, because this is very elaborated on in that text, which is the notion of antagonistic versus non-intagonistic contradictions. So one of the things

that Mao's very attuned to in this text that I think is really fascinating is that you have a socialist revolution, and it's not like contradictions just disappear, right? And I often think when you hear Marxists talking about the necessity of socialist revolution, you can get the impression that they would, right? It's, well, the proletariat represents. the universal interests of all of society, if they are able to establish a dictatorship that eliminates the various contradictions of capitalism, and then we can have a transition into communism. And while that's correct in like the big picture understanding of the historical development of socialism and communism, in practice and in reality, socialism has its own

set of very interesting and difficult contradictions that you need to overcome. But Mao is very insistent in this text that for the most part, there's a big difference because those contradictions are not antagonistic in the same way that contradictions in capitalist society are. So I'll quote Mao here real quick and we can kind of break this down. He writes that quote, contradictions in socialist society are fundamentally different from those in the old societies, such as capitalist society. In capitalist society, contradictions find expression in acute antagonism and conflicts, in sharp class struggle. They cannot be resolved by the capitalist system itself and can only be resolved through socialist revolution. The case is quite different with contradictions in socialist

society. On the contrary, they are not antagonistic and can be ceaselessly resolved by the socialist system itself. So, antagonism versus non-intagonism in this explanation has to do with the necessity of violent revolution, right? And so as Mao outlines it, The antagonisms and contradictions of capitalism are antagonistic precisely because the capitalist system itself is incapable of resolving them. The interests of the proletariat and thus of the people more broadly are fundamentally constrained by the social relationships of private property and private ownership that capitalism imposes. And so, when there's a contradiction between the people and the enemy in capitalist society, the only way to overcome that is the complete overcoming of capitalism itself, and thus the contradiction is antagonistic. There has to be a negation and a transcendent

us of the existing contradiction, and that occurs in the form of violent socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist system and to put the proletariat into power. But after that happens, contradictions do, of course, still exist within socialist society. The difference is that one would no longer need to overthrow that socialist society in order to resolve those contradictions. Those contradictions can be resolved through forms of struggle that emphasize unity, through forms of struggle that attempt to create a broader kind of national push for socialization and industrialization and all these other things. And so one of like the key points in Mao's idea is that contradictions are transformed under socialism, but they are not

eliminated. And this is often a thing when you hear people talk about, like the principles of Maoism. The idea that contradictions continue under socialism is one of the ones that's often pointed out. So I'll quote one last section on this. But Mao writes, of course, new problems will emerge as these contradictions are resolved. And further efforts will be required to resolve the new contradictions. For instance, a constant process of readjustment through state planning is needed to deal with the contradiction between production and the needs of society, which will long remain an objective reality. Every year, our country draws up an economic plan in order to establish a proper ratio between accumulation and consumption and achieve an equilibrium between production

and needs. Equilibrium is nothing but a temporary relative unity of opposites. By the end of each year, equilibrium taken as a whole is upset by the struggle of opposites. The unity undergoes a change. Equilibrium becomes disequilibrium. Unity becomes disunity. And once again, it is necessary to work out an equilibrium and unity for the next year. Herein lies the superiority of our planned economy, end quote. And so here, Mao is saying that actually these contradictions that continue under socialism are a fundamental result of the dialectical structure of reality itself, such that all phenomena are composed by a unity of opposites that can move between equilibrium and disequilibrium. If you've listened to our episode on dialectics of nature, this should all

be sounding very familiar. But the point is that through a planned socialist economy, it is actually possible to intervene into that phenomenon and guide it in ways that can return to equilibrium without having to destroy the presently existing society and build something new. And so this notion of antagonistic versus non-intaginistic contradictions I think is very useful for understanding, you know, Mao's conception of what socialism looks like, how it's different than capitalism, and how it's not just, you know, suddenly all the problems are gone, precisely because dialectics as a structure of reality is still at play within socialist society. Yeah, that's really good.

I just wanted to make some kind of, you know, additional points on that and just to really drive that point home. And I think so much of the contradictions of the capitalist system writ large, right? We're talking about the contradictions within capitalism that are irresolvable that can be resolved and dealt with in socialism. Sort of a month, we're sort of at a higher level than talking about contradictions between people. We're talking about, you know, huge contradictions within the system that cannot be resolved under capitalism. and a few come to mind and you know and this gets to the heart of the anarchy of the market versus a planned economy like as we talk about in dialectics of nature the the next step of human maturation is to take rational control over the economic system of the world instead of being controlled by it the invisible hand of the market the anarchy of production a bunch of individual capitalists vying for the profit maximization this is clearly an unsustainable way to run a global economy and the crisis that are emerging are indicative of that and also are irresolvable within the system. And one of them that is obvious to anybody living in the 21st century is the ecological contradiction, the

contradiction between a capitalist mode of production, you know, that's extractive, that is rooted in separateness from the environment, that plunders and commodifies everything. That is premised on infinite growth, right? That is an unsustainable contradiction that capitalism literally cannot resolve. You cannot have a green capitalism because at the core of capitalism is an extractive, exploitative system that can never be made to be harmonious with the ecological balance. The raw pursuit of profit maximization and the raw pursuit of infinite growth are just irresolvably in contradiction with a healthy and sustainable biosphere. Socialism can resolve that contradiction by central planning, by taking over the economic forces, eliminating the

anarchy of the market, seeing what the actual human needs are. How do we meet human needs and how do we meet those needs in such a way that we stay inside the limits of the ecological restraints of this planet and the health of the biosphere, realizing dialectically that the health of our civilization is not separate from the health of the biosphere and ecology more broadly, but are actually deeply and inexorably inseparable. And while that can seem like obvious truth to you and I, the system that we live in rejects that idea implicitly and explicitly every single day. And so some other contradictions is inequality.

You cannot resolve rabid inequality, the idea that some people have 10 houses and live in yachts and live lives of unimaginable luxury and comfort and privilege and opulence, while many, many, many more people live in forced and artificial states of endless toil and precarity. You cannot resolve that contradiction within capitalism again for the core mechanisms that make capitalism move forward. Private property, profit accumulation, anarchy of the market. You know, those things are just always going to be a problem under capitalism. They can never be resolved within it.

Socialism can resolve those issues. and um the obviously the other one would be irresolvable endless conflict it is true that conflict and war have always been a part of human nature um going you know going back tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of years going back to our you know chimp like ancestors um you know it's it's in it's in our ancestral heritage that there is a warring aspect to us but for sure class society broadly and capitalist monopoly capitalism in particular fuel endless conflict. That conflict will never be resolved because anywhere anybody stands up and says we will not

allow multinational corporations to plunder our resources, there's going to be conflict. Anytime anybody stands up and says, we want to organize our economy for the benefit of human well-being and not for profit maximization of Western colonial entities, there's going to be conflict. And just imperial powers themselves, constantly colliding and fighting over territory and dividing it up and redividing it up. That is endless conflict and there's no way that you could end war under this system of brutality and competition and imperialism. And socialism doesn't guarantee that war has ended, but it gives us the necessary prerequisites to be able to resolve conflict

through a multilateral, democratic, internationalist system where everybody is regarded as equals and where exploitation and extractive plundering of other people's resources is no longer a necessity for the system to operate. You know, where people don't need to be broken up into pools of consumers and pools of cheap labor for the benefit of a global capitalist class, that conflict can be resolved under socialism. These are not easy things to resolve. And the shift to socialism doesn't magically wave a wand and these contradictions go away.

it simply allows you to actually finally resolve those contradictions if you put your mind to it, if you experiment properly, and you follow through. And so the possibility is there with socialism. It's not there under capitalism. And I think we really got to understand this as the crises that I'm talking about continue to mount in the 21st century. And we could also talk about a million other things like AI and CRISPR and gene editing and class stratification in those regards and a million other things that just cannot be resolved here. And so this is what we mean by socialism is necessary. Like we have to move to this more rational system or we are going to as a civilization fall off a cliff, hit a brick wall, send ourselves back hundreds, maybe thousands of years of regression because we finally, whatever, you know, destroy the ecological basis for human life or enter World War III and nuclear war begins, et cetera. So it really is a necessity in that regard. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And I think, you know, every day it becomes more and more clear how much this is the only option that we have, right?

You know, here in Los Angeles, things are pretty fucking horrific right now, increasingly every day. And you do see how we're just not going to overcome, you know, the contradictions that are producing this within this given society. And I think it's tough, right? We'll talk about can bad things be turned into good things later on. But there's people coming to that realization in a way that I think, is quite good despite the horrific nature of sort of the crises that we're facing. And it'll be necessary to continue to point to this analysis as more and more terminal crises of capitalism continue to mount. Yeah. Before we move on, do you want to talk about, um, we talked about the people and enemies. And, um, I think a core idea here is the dialectic between democracy and dictatorship. Right. Yeah. What Mao is arguing is honestly open, flourishing higher level. of democracy within the domain of the people. Yeah, open debate. Yeah, I mean, you know, different ideas and we'll get into that with

the 100 flowers and 100 schools stuff in a little bit. But the dictatorship is against the enemies. Like people who are just outright, you know, you think of the capitalist, the colonialist, the imperialist, who are just no matter what, outright hostile to the socialist transformation of society. Not those that are confused, not those that are hesitant or those that still have questions, but those whose very core interests are in direct contrast to socialist transformation, then we are brutal with them, as they are with us, as the, as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is fucking brutal to anybody who stands in its way and always fucking has been. You know, we, we, as Marx once said, you know, we have, we expect no compassion from you

and we will give you none, whatever. I butcher that quote, but you get the point. And I think that's an important thing. Democracy within the people, dictatorship against enemies, right? And I think that's a core aspect here. Yeah, that's exactly what it's about to jump into, actually, going into unity, struggle, unity. No, you're good because I think it's really important, right? This is, you know, this interplay between dictatorship and proletariat and dictatorship for our enemies and democracy for the people is super crucial. So I actually will just quote briefly from Mao on this. So he says that, quote, Dictatorship does not apply within the ranks of the people. The people cannot exercise dictatorship over themselves, nor must one section of the people oppress another. Lawbreakers among the people will be punished according to the law,

but this is different in principle from the exercise of dictatorship to suppress enemies of the people. What applies among the people is democratic centralism. Our constitution lays it down that the citizens of the people's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, the press, assembly, association, procession, demonstration, religious belief, and so on. Our Constitution also provides that the organs of the state must practice democratic centralism, that they rely on the masses, and that their personnel must serve the people. Our socialist democracy is the broadest kind of democracy, such as is not found in any bourgeois state. Our dictatorship is the people's democratic dictatorship, led by the working class and based on the worker-peasant

alliance. That is to say, democracy operates within the ranks of the people, while the working class, uniting with all others enjoying civil rights, and in the first place with the peasantry, enforced dictatorship over the reactionary classes and elements, and all those who resist socialist transformation and oppose socialist construction. By several rights we mean politically the rights of freedom and democracy. But this freedom is a freedom with leadership, and this democracy is democracy under centralized guidance, not anarchy. So, you know, that quote, I think, really gets at this idea of democracy that Mao is really emphasizing. And when we hear dictatorship of the proletariat, it's hard for us sometimes, I think, to conceptualize,

well, how is that, you know, how can a dictatorship be democratic? But Mao is saying it's precisely because the dictatorship is led by the people who have democratic decision-making and input within the organs of the state and the party. Because the state applies the mass line and interacts with the people and takes up their ideas and can integrate to the people into the party to make them into revolutionaries as well, such that there is democratic accountability to the people themselves, to the progressive classes fighting for socialist transformation. And that also creates a state infrastructure that can be wielded repressively when necessary against those elements who are standing in the way of socialist transformation.

And so this is a very different idea of democracy from what I think we conceptualize in liberalism. I think Mao is putting forth an interesting conjecture here that democracy doesn't have to be universal to be democratic, right? That's kind of this interesting idea that really flies in the face of liberal understandings of democracy. But Mao is suggesting that it's this democratic approach that allows for contradictions to be solved non antagonistically because the people are able to engage in criticism, able to engage in struggle within the democratic organs that apply to them, but do not apply to the counter-revolutionary reactionary classes in a society. Yes. And what I like about this is that it is open and honest, right? In a way, in a way that liberal democracy is not. Liberal democracy

is a is a, is a, a masquerade, a mask that obscures the actual dictator. that underlies it. Liberal democracy is incredibly truncated, incredibly limited, often offered as a salve, pressure release aspect of a broader system that does not care ultimately at all what regular people think. And that's true across the right and left in our societies and across Western societies, right? Regular people, regardless of where on the political spectrum they fall, regular working class people, almost every single one who is at all politically aware will acknowledge when pushed to any significant degree that they have really no say in their system and that while we can protest and while we can vote that the elites in control of this society are virtually

non-responsive whatsoever to our demands and there have been objective academic studies that have proven that the interest of the majority of people in so-called liberal democratic societies have zero impact not a little bit not sometimes have zero impact on the big policies that matter, especially when it comes to the economy and, you know, foreign policy, i.e. imperialism and many other things. But what liberalism does is it dresses up a bourgeois dictatorship as a democracy. And what we're saying here is no. We're actually going to advance democracy beyond anything possible under liberal capitalism, while also being incredibly honest that those who want to subordinate humanity forever to their own boot will be dealt with harshly.

And part two of this text will get liberals and anti-communists, you know, get their blood worked up. But it's called eliminating counter-revolutionaries, more or less. And it's about the necessity of eliminating those who are not just like the guy down the street in a maga hat, you know, who works at the grocery store and thinks socialism is bad. but people with wealth and power who will leverage that wealth and power to prevent the socialist transformation of society. You know, maybe the guy down the street with really bad reactionary ideas could be isolated, you know, could be a talk to, people can plead with him. But he doesn't have power and wealth to really do anything.

There's no need to go out and attack that guy. But the people with power and wealth, I mean, think of entities like the CIA. I mean, just as a fun little example. If we had a socialist revolution, would we not need to fucking. harshly deal with the CIA and the Mossad as like a step one necessary prerequisite to be able to move further at all. Would we not have to harshly deal with the upper echelons of the military industrial complex and the political and economic elite in this society who have the leverage, the wealth and the power and the international connections to really put a wrench in our ability

to transform society in the ways that it needs to be transformed? Of course we have to. And in the same way that Mossad and the CIA deal harshly and violently and brutally with their enemies, we too are open and honest about our need to deal harshly with theirs. What they're trying to do is defend a system of privilege and exploitation and plundering and mass murder. And what we're trying to do is advance humanity to a state where we can actually live in harmony and sustainability with the environment where every human being on this planet gets enough to live a decent life and where we can break the bonds and the stupidities of class society and its brutal. violent hierarchies. So they're both going to involve violence. One is in the violence of horrific,

brutal ideas of repression and oppression for an exploitation forever. And one is violence in the service of pushing humanity forward, which we truly believe, and we will not stand down on the fact that we believe that our politics broadly construed. It could be wrong on specific details. We can work that out. Broadly construed, our ideas are good for humanity. And ironically, even good for the people that right now benefit from this system ostensibly even the miserable motherfuckers that have billions of dollars and still want to be liked

and you know Jeff Bezos still wants to wear the cowboy hat and come off like an every guy and Elon Musk still wants you to laugh at his jokes these people are actually fucking miserable and what they don't understand is the society that we aim to create will actually benefit them in the long run it will take away their material privileges

and for them that feel like death, but the actual society we will create that is one based in community and sustainability and free time and relationships instead of consuming things will actually create happier individuals across the human spectrum, including themselves. We actually, funnily enough, aim to liberate the billionaires from their positions, you know, and they will, they will be better off for it in the long run, truly. And that's a funny irony of all of this. Totally. Yeah. Okay. Okay, I'll transition real quick to talk about the other point that I wanted to hit that flows from democracy, I think, which is this notion of a formula that Mao talks about in this text of unity criticism unity, which I often hear people talk about is unity struggle unity. Mao uses criticism and struggle almost identically in this area of the text, so I think either formulation gets at the same thing.

But when talking about, you know, this democratic approach to resolving contradictions non-intagonistically, Mao points out that this is a formula, unity, criticism, unity, which the party has been able to successfully employ, and does some interesting, like, contrasting of this approach with sort of dogmatism. So I'll read a quote again, and then we'll discuss a bit. But Mao writes that this democratic method of resolving contradiction among the people was epitomized in 1942 in the formula unity criticism unity. To elaborate, that means starting from the desire for unity, resolving contradictions through criticism or struggle and arriving at a new unity on a new basis. In our experience, this is the correct method of resolving contradictions among the people. In 1942,

we used it to resolve contradictions inside the Communist Party, namely the contradictions between the dogmatists and the great majority of membership and between dogmatism and Marxism. The left dogmatists had resorted to the method of ruthless struggle and merciless blows in inter-party struggle. It was the wrong method. In criticizing left dogmatism, we did not use this old method, but adopted a new one, that is, one of starting from the desire of unity, distinguishing between right and wrong through criticism and arriving at new unity on a new basis. End quote.

So, Mao here is talking about this approach, this very practical approach, to resolving contradictions where one starts by affirming the desire for unity, that that is the outcome that one is trying to work towards. And again, if these contradictions truly are non-intagonistic, then unity ought to be the end goal, right? We ought not need to rupture in order to resolve the contradiction. So we start with the desire for unity. But then we move to criticism and struggle, and we make clear, here's what I believe is wrong that you are saying or doing in the situation. And you make that clear. And we struggle together around that. And that struggle is not antagonistic. The point is not to liquidate the other side or something like that.

The function of that struggle is to find agreement and to find the correct ideas and to hash these things out through open criticism and then take the results of that struggle, the results of that criticism, and use them as a basis for another form of unity and unity around a new position. And so in this conception, part of the process of coming to the right position for resolving these contradictions happens dialectically in this back and forth that occurs in the criticism phase. And I think it's worth noting that what's very clear in this text is that unity criticism, unity is not a one-time thing. This is a constant dialectical back and flow within the party and within socialist society. And if we think about the Hundred Flowers campaign and then it's

transition into the anti-rightist campaign, we can actually kind of see this application of this period of criticism, where it's very encouraged and we engage in it, and then we use that as the basis for another form of unity, and then actually having room to push back against ideological mistakes. And this process continues on over and over again. And so I think this is really one of these useful ideas that you find in this text, not just because, you know, this is how things are resolved in a socialist society, as Mao points out, but also because Mao looks at this as a way of interacting within a party. And I think we could consider whether or not there are times where this is the correct way to interact within leftist organization generally.

There are probably antagonistic contradictions within the thing that we call the left, because we still exist in capitalist society. But it is a mistake to identify all contradictions as antagonistic. And I would say probably most of them are not antagonistic. And this gives us a model and a formula we can use that can acknowledge contradictions, but approach them in a non-intaginistic manner. So I think that is really one of the. interesting things here, and I really like this formula that we get in this text.

Yeah, and I love this, and I want to highlight a few things that I think are relevant to this. The first starting point is the, and he makes this very clear, the genuine desire for unity. So you're starting from this unity struggle, unity dialectic. You are starting from a genuine, open, good faith, desire to reach unity. You're not starting from the position of, I'm right. right. I just need to convince everybody, right? You're starting from the position of genuine desire for unity, and that's what you're going for. And this whole process is in service of that. And you can see all the time in organizing circles, certainly online, that this is not done in a principled way. This is done

in the dogmatic way. This is done in a clickish way. This is, you know, what he calls ruthless struggle and merciless blows by sectarians and empirists. And this is not starting. And, you know, when it's done by Maoists, it's even particularly more grotesque because you should know that this is starting. I'm not talking about all Maoists. Of course, I love Maoists and, you know, have been accused of being one myself. But, you know, there are, of course, some. And there's some Leninists and there's some of these in every single political group, right, left and center, who are not really interested in that, who are starting from a position where they're convinced internally that they're right. And it's just a matter of browbeating you until you submit to them. And so let's zoom out a

little bit and touch on some other things that I talk about all the time with regards to this because if we're really interested in making this work, a couple, there's two main things that we have to wrestle with. The first one is something I talk about all the time and Allison does as well, which is ego. This is why I think it's important for all of us to do the work of humbling our own egos. Our egos are not only the ego aspect that wants to be right and you know, not everybody's ego manifests is like this sectarian desire to browbeat everybody into submission, it manifests in adverseness to conflict or, you know, just a bunch of different postures and affectations, you know, the risk of not wanting to be embarrassed or whatever it may

be, that this egoism that we sometimes bring to organizing is a real problem. And a huge way that it manifests is getting really uncomfortable with conflict and getting really uncomfortable with being criticized. And one of the best benefits of putting your ego in its proper place is the real genuine open ability to take criticism without recoiling and cringing and wanting to fight back and hyper fixating on what they said and trying, you know, just letting it go. Like, okay, yeah, I was wrong about that. Nothing is more liberating than to be able to admit you were wrong about something, to ask somebody for forgiveness, to be willing to be corrected, to have somebody point on an argument that is just better than yours and win you over to that side, right?

But done so in a principled way, you're not just succumbing because you're conflict diverse or, you know, you don't want to step on anybody's toes. You're doing it because the arguments are better and the thing that they've appealed to, they've constructed in a way that makes sense to you and say, okay, you know, and I think so, so that's a huge part of it. And everywhere, anywhere, there's even one huge insane ego in the room. it can derail the process like this, right? And so I think that that's important. And the other aspect is truth. We care about truth, not only in our political lives, in our personal lives, that we are open, honest people seeking truth more than we're seeking validation or self-recognition or status or anything to do with ourselves. Truth, it matters more.

And this whole process doesn't work if there's not a genuine search for truth. and a genuine honesty about your own intentions and your own thoughts. Mao does a great sort of role modeling here of just being totally truthful about our position. That we are never, whether we're talking to anybody, we know people that agree with us, people that disagree with us, we're never going to pretend to believe stuff we don't. We're never going to hide any of our actual views and positions. What do they say, the communist disdain to conceal their views? right because that underhandedness that deceitfulness already destroys any possibility of genuine unity

because you're there's a condescension there's a patronizing element of being dishonest to people of manipulating people of of hiding your true intentions and values and thoughts so always be open and honest about them you know tactfully of course i mean you know there's a million reasons or million um examples of not being tactful you don't need to like just blurt things out in people's faces and be weird about it, but, you know, being open and honest, seeking truth, and that comes with the diminution of the ego. The ego will sacrifice truth and honesty to advance itself or to get itself out of a tough situation. And so truth seeking and ego transcendence ultimately are the same process, you know, and I think that's, that comes through here. And that just, and the reason I

mention that is because it's not just political values. Of course, they're essential in political context. They're personal values you can work on right here and now in your own personal life. And then they extend to community. They extend a political organization. When you're an honest, selfless person in your day-to-day life, it's much easier to be that in political organizations. If you're a selfish, egoic person that is dishonest in your personal life, and then all of a sudden you come into a political organization and we're going to expect you to magically turn into something you're not, it's impossible. And the final thing I wanted to say here is we actually, this unity struggle unity idea is, is present in the dialectics of

relationships. If you have successful relationships, especially with the partner who you live with and you share finances with and you go through the daily grind with, successful relationships are built on this, right? Right. You're not, if you just want to be right all the time, relationship will not succeed. If you have a genuine desire born out of love for this other person to unify, compromise, come to a shared mutually beneficial endpoint, you naturally engage in this sort of process. And so again, the personal and the political are not so separate. And this stuff caches out not only in the political and social realm, but in the personal individual realm. And I think that is that is something to think about and and it it brings it down to ground level because

you know yeah this stuff may come up in a political dispute you may wait months or you know you don't know when that's going to exactly happen but every single day you can be truthful every single day you can put other people before yourself every single day you can engage honestly work through problems put your ego aside compromise negotiate find the truth and that sort of person who does that is much better equipped to then enter the political and so social arena and do so do so in a principled way so I just wanted to to emphasize that and really just I love this idea because it all starts with a selfless desire for genuine unity which is ultimately rooted in our deep deep desire to win to advance the ball to actually solve these

problems and that comes before everything else yeah yeah no I think that's super good to emphasize and it's funny right everyone always wants to talk about the political theory but no one wants to about the kind of, like, becoming the kind of person who can engage in politics productively. I think that often gets very neglected. And that's probably why you and I end up coming back to it so frequently, as you hear very little discussion of that. But it does matter, right? I think when you think of the people historically who made huge political impacts, one of the kind of, like, main defining features that I would point to you is like a self-discipline, right and a kind of ability to not just be driven by whims not just be driven by ego but to put

you know something bigger than themselves first and i think that is a thing as you're saying you can cultivate that and you can overcome that so i don't know i appreciate you pointing that out for sure okay i think those two elements that we just addressed are the big elements we spent a lot of time on those i'll probably go through these other aspects a little bit quicker of course this is a free text online anybody can go and read it and we encourage you to do so but this next point i think is really interesting it has parallels to the u.s. context this is where Mao talks about Han supremacy right sort of a national chauvinism in a multinational society which obviously is true in the u.s. context as well

so this is a very short little section a couple sentences i'll just read it and then we can get into some of the core ideas and the parallels to the u.s. context so Mao says the The minority nationalities in our country number more than 30 million. Although they constitute only 6% of the total population, they inhabit extensive regions which comprise 50 to 60% of China's total area. It is thus imperative to foster good relation between the Han people and the minority nationalities. The key to this question lies in overcoming Han chauvinism.

At the same time, efforts should also be made to overcome local nationality chauvinism, wherever it exists among the minority nationalities. Both Han chauvinism and local nationality chauvinism are harmful to the unity of the nationalities. They represent one kind of contradiction among the people which should be resolved. We have already done some work to this end. In most of the areas inhabited by minority nationalities, there has been considerable improvement in the relationships between the nationalities.

But a number of problems remain to be solved. In some areas, both Han chauvinism and local nationalities, there has been solved. nationality chauvinism still exists to a serious degree, and this demands full attention. As a result of the efforts of the people of all nationalities over the last few years, democratic reforms and socialist transformation have, in the main, been completed in most of the minority nationality areas. Democratic reforms have not yet been carried out in Tibet because conditions are not ripe. According to the 17 article agreement reached between the Central People's Government and the local government of Tibet, the reform of the social system

must be carried out, but the timing can only be decided when the great majority of the people of Tibet and the local leading public figures consider it opportune, and one should not be impatient. It has now been decided not to proceed with democratic reforms in Tibet during the period of the second five-year plan, whether to proceed with them in the period of the third five-year plan can only be decided in the light of the situation at the time. And I think what this shows more than anything, is this real sensitivity that Mao has, this realization

that these different nationalities and the contradictions and tensions that exist within them do not have to be antagonistic, but that primarily, you know, in this case, because it's the majority, the Han chauvinism is a contradiction that needs to be resolved. And

the ways you resolve it is by building unity, overcoming your own chauvinism. And in the case of Tibet, not rushing reforms and let's be clear about this reforms that are absolutely absolutely needed um that the Tibetan situation is is a is a you know a controversial issue to say the least and I've talked about you know the the feelings within Buddhist communities across the world right because there's so much purchase of Tibetan Buddhism

and global Buddhism that this often comes up and is like a really interesting probably the predominant, maybe the liberal versus revolutionary contradiction is more important or, you know, more necessarily to be resolved. But the Tibetan situation and the anti-communism that emerges out of it, I think is really something that continues to bite. And I think we just have to be clear that before 1959, like Tibet was a brutal, feudal theocracy. It was highly stratified, highly unequal. The Dalai Lama and the nobility which were only about 5% of the population. They owned the vast majority of the land and the wealth. There was a monastic elite about 20% of the male population

who held immense economic and social and political power. The vast majority of Tibetans were serfs and slaves. They lived in extreme poverty and bondage. They were subject to forced labor and debt servitude and brutal medieval punishments and torture. There was no universal education, No universal health care, no democratic participation. Women had no rights whatsoever.

The punishments that I were talking about earlier, you know, the medieval ones, like mutilations, floggings, amputations, imprisonment in iron collars or chains. Okay, I'm sorry, there's a beautiful cultural flourishing of Tibetan Buddhism, which I have deep reverence for. But in this case, this was a brutal, semi-futal, antiquated system that needed to be transformed for the liberation of the people who were exploited and brutalized under it. That is not to say that there were not excesses during the cultural revolution where Red Guards attacked monasteries, destroyed religious texts and artifacts and, you know, did suppress Tibetan Buddhism more broadly. But you have to understand what was attempting to be confronted and dismantled.

And even in that situation, even when Mao was looking over at Tibet and seeing brutal oppression and feudal aristocracies and exploitation, no justice, no access to the basics of a decent life. He's still trying to be sensitive about it, still being thoughtful, still trying to wait and be patient to cultivate good relationships with Tibetans more broadly before making the necessary reforms, which he knew were necessary. And even that reticence, that hesitation, it shows his sensitivity to the issue. but in some situations when you have slavery and serfdom like this when women have no rights whatsoever he would be justified and in a large extent communist china was justified in going in and ending that shit and it creates lots of issues and lots of conflict and still to this day there's lots of deep deep resentment but what was the alternative to leave people in slavery and serfdom

to allow women to be in a position of absolutely having no rights whatsoever to allow a small of people to own all the wealth and land and have nobody have any ability to, you know, advance their life quality in any meaningful way. So, you know, this is a broader issue and maybe we can do a whole episode on it. But I think, I think it speaks interestingly to the principled nature of what Mao and the communists at that time were trying to do. They were right on the fact that Tibet needed to be reformed. They were, they were patient to go and do it. And then when they did do it Of course, it creates conflict. But overall, I would probably argue that Tibet is in a better place now.

And to be clear, the Tibetan feudal system was explicitly backed by the CIA. Okay? The intelligence agencies of Western imperialist states were using Tibet as a stronghold and fomenting anti-communist resistance. And they wanted to use Tibet as they used Taiwan today as an imperial and colonial foothold to subordinate China to stop the progress of Chinese communism, etc. We all know how the CIA operates and so this was a CIA

backed regime. We can't lose sight of that. Again, it's not to say that nothing ever bad happened that there were no excesses that people don't have legitimate grievances but on the whole this was a necessary reform process and yeah, it's used

often cynically as an anti-communist sledgehammer. But I'm going to talk about U.S. parallels, but is there anything you want to say on that before we move on, Allison? Yeah, I mean, I think the CIA point is good, right? I think that what this little section makes me think about is the extent to which, like, ethnic separatism has become the basis for a lot of anti-communist propaganda. Like, you talk about Tibet as an example, but I remember, like, one of these, like, pro-NATO accounts, like tweeting a map of China with like, oh, here's what China

would look like if every ethnic group had their own republic. And it's like 30 nations, right? And there's just this kind of, it's like CIA twisting of decolonial thought sort of that gets used in this kind of anti-communism. And I think Mao here is kind of laying the groundwork, almost in anticipation of that kind of approach, to say, well, on the one hand, like, we need to recognize that, like, socialism can overcome these contradictions between the different nationalities within the country. And then on the other hand, we also have to overcome genuine, very real existing chauvinism. Otherwise, we will be vulnerable to those kinds of movements.

And so I think you can broadly see, like, the prescience of this section in a lot of ways and the necessity of fighting chauvinism as a way of kind of being prepared to be able to handle cynical uses of separatism as kind of an anti-communist position. Yeah. And it is the, it is the wet dream of Western imperialists to balkanize China and they also want to balkanize Russia, right? It's very clear. And we see these maps all the time. go on YouTube and just look it up and there's a million fucking fever dream fantasies about how they're going to split these countries into 30, 40 different countries.

Why? Because fragmented non-unified societies with separate economies are weaker, more susceptible to infiltration, more susceptible to being dominated by monopoly capital. And if you have big unified countries with large, strong economies and military might, it's much, much fucking harder for Western imperialist and colonial entities to go in and dismantle enemy societies and so and just the idea of of westerners sitting in their comfy chairs fantasizing about balkanizing these other countries they know fucking nothing about it's just it's grotesque but that is that is the sort of hammer used as alison was saying against these movements pretending to presenting itself in sort of yeah progressive garb almost right you know self

determination. They'll throw that, they'll throw that word around. And so, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a grotesque inversion oftentimes. But so I just wanted to make a quick parallel. What's the U.S. analog? That's fucking obvious. What's the U.S. analog to Han Chauvinism? It's white chauvinism. We live in the imperial core of a settler colonial society. And it is, it is white chauvinism in the socialist movement and in the population more broadly, that is the parallel to Han Chauvinism. And that must be struggled against. And ways that white chauvinism manifests is, you know, class reductionism, dismissing all race struggles as identity politics or liberalism, failing to genuinely confront the

settler colonial nature of American society and the necessity of toppling settler colonial structures in an actual socialist revolution, papering over those contradictions pretending they don't exist, the embrace of American patriotism and nationalism as this sort of, yeah, it's a chauvinist act of embracing an entity which is outright hostile to the oppressed nationalities within it, especially black and indigenous peoples and their histories and their self-determination, tokenizing or marginalizing, you know, black and indigenous leadership instead of, you know, genuinely. embracing that is necessary. The idea that white working class people are going to be the vanguard of the revolution and not

indigenous and black and poor people inside the imperial core fighting for self-determination. The front lines of struggles are often not in union halls. They're urban uprisings. They're resistance to pipelines. Climate resistance. Resistance often from

indigenous communities against extractive capitalism, prison abolition movements. You know, these are more revolutionary sites of struggle than, you know, a relatively comfortable, at least so far, white working class

labor aristocracy. And so, you know, there's much more to be said about this, but I think that's a direct, a parallel and analogy here. And we see it emerge on the so-called socialist left in the U.S. in the embrace of American nationalism,

and the disregard of the settler colonial nature of this society, the downplaying of, you know, minority nationality, self-determination, the wrinkling over of those very real contradictions, etc. So, yeah, Allison, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I think white chauvinism definitely is the analog there. And I think, yeah, you see this in these kind of, like, again, crass, orthodox Marxist, like, workersists that would assume that, like, the economic struggle of the proletariat is the only struggle. that matters for revolutionaries in the United States. And, you know, I'm going to keep referencing this because I'm in the middle of everything happening here. In Los Angeles, we are seeing that that is an important struggle, but also the struggle of people against deportation, the struggle of, you know, I'm seeing the struggle of a lot of indigenous Mexican communities that live here who are trying to figure out community self-defense in the face of intensive state repression, who are trying to figure out how to, you know, do organizing in the face of what our

complicated, layered, colonial contradictions, all are actually kind of becoming the center of these movements. And I also think the other thing to point out is that there's this interesting sense in which these broader social movements are cohering into a broader struggle, right? One of the things that's been fascinating to see in L.A. that warms my heart is in the streets, Mexican and Palestinian flags flying alongside each other, right, by the same crowd. And this recognition that these different fronts that, again, all relate to colonialism and the fight against colonialism are this generative space for this united movement that I think really is important for socialists and communists to tap into. And I think a sort of white chauvinism that

brushes that off as identity politics or secondary to, you know, just very workerist understandings of what organizing means is, you know, to quote the Bolsheviks going to be left in the dustbin of history, right? Like, that is not where things are moving. And that chauvinism will ultimately make your politics completely irrelevant in the context of the contradictions that are driving crisis here in the United States.

Yeah, and a major American figure that did this the right way is Fred Hampton. And he's often cynically employed by people who want to dismiss these very real issues, right, in a sort of class reductionist way that wants to dismiss all these other things as identity politics. but that's actually the exact opposite because what Fred Hampton was doing was resolving these contradictions in a principled way. He wasn't hand-waving away the contradictions or

papering over them or pretending they didn't exist. He was through struggle and in the pursuit of unity was actually organizing in a way that resolve these contradictions, brought people together in genuine unity for a genuine vision that liberates everybody. And to disson dismiss these things or to cynically use him as an excuse for why you don't take these, you know, black liberation and indigenous liberation struggle seriously or why they're secondary or not important, I think is a denigration to the legacy and memory of Fred Hampton because that he was doing the exact opposite. You're being unprincipled. He was doing it in a principled way. Yep. And who knows and who knows what he would have achieved if he could live past fucking 21 before he was right. Yeah. Right. Um, okay. Well, that's an obvious analog. and then we'll go into this next section here, which is, I'm going to kind of go somewhat quickly through these, but, you know, I think we've touched on this quite a bit, which is the 100 flowers and 100 schools of thought campaigns. And the 100 flowers, you know, let 100 flowers bloom, let 100 schools of thought contend. It was about encouraging open criticism in art and intellectual theory, right?

It was the flowers blooming is artistic flowers blooming that we're not going to necessarily impose a certain genre of arts. on artists that we're going to let people express themselves and we're going to open up society because Mao really genuinely believed that, as we said earlier, Marxism is not afraid of critique. It's not afraid to wrestle with other ideas. We are totally confident in our ability to engage with any idea across the board and contend with any critique. And also, good Marxists understand that when we are wrong, we are the first ones to admit it and try to rectify it.

So that leaves us in a position where we don't need it. hide. We don't need to run away. We don't need to obscure or be afraid of this stuff whatsoever. Mao believed that truth does emerge through struggle. That truth is not something that is just declared, but it actually emerges in communities struggling with different lines and different ideas and coming to resolutions naturally and organically through that struggle. And he also believed in ideological diversity, right? That different ideas and allowing people to speak and not cracking down on people or anybody that descends from a single line should be brutally harshly condemned.

He's like, those things weaken our movement. Those things weaken Marxism and the Communist Party more broadly. But of course, there's the pendulum swinging too far. And there was elements that, you know, made the party uncomfortable and there was a certain excess. And so it did end up in the anti-rightist campaigns, which did. punished dissent in many instances. And I think that is not unexpected. I think that's something that we should honestly and openly wrestle with here.

Like there is a back and forth thing here. There is a balance to be struck here. And it is, it's, yeah, I don't know, what are your, what are your kind of thoughts on, on when, when there is justification for, for crackdown? Yeah, I think this is such an interesting question, right? And this is one of the sections of this text that's hard to know, like, oh, how would we apply it now? Because the 100 Flowers campaign takes place within a specific context after the founding of the socialist dictatorship, right?

And we are very much not in that context. So it's hard to, like, copy and paste it. I mean, I think broadly the way that I look at the 100 Flowers campaign and then the anti-rightist campaign afterwards is I try to think about them dialectically. And I think when you hear how people talk about the Hundred Flowers campaign, there's kind of two mistaken errors that you'll hear. Maybe three, actually. And so I'll try to contrast with those. One, I think there's kind of like a left dogmatist position that says the Hundred Flowers campaign was an absolute mistake. And the, you know, anti-rightist campaign was a necessary rectification of that mistake. I see that as kind of the more dogmatist approach. There's the liberal approach like you talked about that says, says, well, the Hundred Flowers Campaign was basically a trap that set the framework for the anti-rightist campaign to be able to know who to crack down on. And then there's kind of the more right Marxist approach that basically tends to say the Hundred Flowers campaign was quite good and progressive and should have continued, and the anti-rightist campaign was a mistake that followed

it up, basically. Kind of the inverse of the left dogmatist approach to it. And I think all of those miss what is important about the Hundred Flowers campaign, which is that the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Anti-Ridus Campaign that followed it aren't separable phenomena from each other. You can't think of them in one-sided ways in contradistinction to each other. If unity struggle unity is necessary, then you're going to move back and forth between those different moments. And unity in the context of the anti-rightist campaign, yes, we should say did look repressive, right? That was a repressive enforcement of unity. But I also think we can just insist that that was necessary. It is possible for right-wing forces to consolidate power within governments and within parties, even in socialist societies. It would be better were that not the case, but it can occur. So even though there is a fundamental necessity of moments and more open criticism, those necessarily have a correspondence to moments of reestablishing unity, even if repressively.

And that is one of those things that, again, I think we just have to be honest about. And I think this is true in bourgeois dictatorship as well, right? For all of bourgeois dictatorships talk of free speech, it's very quick to crack down on free speech the moment that it becomes a threat to the actual bourgeois system of class rule. And so again, I think this is another place where we can just be more honest than the liberals, that criticism is not an end in and of itself. Criticism is part of this dialectical process that we are employing towards the development, of socialism and the development of communism.

And so that's kind of how I look at it. I don't like the kind of compare and contrasty between the two different campaigns because I think they ought to be understood as this broader back and forth and this transition between equilibrium and disequilibrium within the contradictions of socialist society.

And the same thing happened with the cultural revolution. It's swinging into excesses, sending young people to the countryside to, you know, work in the fields and, you know, get attuned with the rural. masses. And this is a pattern that is present throughout the Chinese revolution in almost every major iteration of it, which we shouldn't shy away from, right? This is what it is. This is what it would be like. And if we had a revolution here, do you think it wouldn't come with enormous

obstacles, with excesses, with wild experimentations? The thing about Marxism is that there are universalizable aspects to revolution, but there's also specificities. And every revolution in every new context will have different shades of obstacles and challenges and while there are some broad things that you can apply, it takes an open-minded, dialectical, experimental approach to work through some of these problems. There are no easy answers on hand. And certainly, if we're going to have a revolution in an imperial core country in the 21st century, it's going to be different in many ways than, you know, revolutions in Russia or Cuba or China in the last century. So just two quick quotes before we move on here.

One speaks to something that we've kind of been touching on or that, you know, maybe we didn't touch on fully, which is right opportunism or right deviationism or revisionism. And it's just worth talking about very quickly. Mao says, at the same time as we criticize dogmatism, you know, left-wing, left-deviationist dogmatism, we must direct our attention to criticizing revisionism. revisionism or right opportunism is a bourgeois trend of thought that is even more dangerous than dogmatism. The revisionists, the right opportunists, pay lip service to Marxism. They too attack dogmatism. But what they are really attacking is the quintessence of Marxism. They oppose or distort materialism and dialectics, oppose or try to weaken the people's democratic dictatorship and the leading role of the Communist Party,

and oppose or try to weaken socialist transformation and socialist construction. even after the basic victory of our socialist revolution, there will still be a number of people in our society who vainly hope to restore the capitalist system and are sure to fight the working class on every front, including the ideological ones. And their right-hand men in this struggle are the revisionists. And that's the end of the quote. So importantly, there at the end, he says, there are people who are that do hope for the restoration of capitalism. And he's not saying that these are the revisionists or the right opportunists.

You know, these are like this, the outright, you know, hostile enemies of Marxism and communism. But he says the revisionists are their right-hand men in this struggle, meaning that they play a critical role in the facilitation of that capitalist restoration, even though the revisionist or the right opportunist will be to the left of those who are actually outright hostile to socialism and explicitly want the restoration of capitalism. So I thought that was a really interesting and worthwhile nuance to touch on because those two groups can be collapsed into one, I think, wrongly. And then the last quote is just on the campaign itself. And here Mao lays out some criteria, right, for, as we'll see, I'll just read the whole quote because he repeats it. So he says, literally the two slogans, let 100 flowers blossom and let 100 schools of thought contend,

have no class character. The proletariat can turn them to account. and so can the bourgeoisie or others. Different classes, strata, and social groups each have their own views on what are fragrant flowers and what are poisonous weeds. Then, from the point of view of the masses, what should be the criteria today for distinguishing flagrant flowers from poisonous weeds? In their political activities, how should our people judge whether a person's words and deeds are right or wrong? On the basis of the principles of our Constitution, the will, of the overwhelming majority of our people and the common political positions which have been proclaimed on various occasions by our political parties, we consider that, broadly speaking, the criteria

should be as follows. 1. Words and deeds should help to unite and not divide the people of all nationalities. 2. They should be beneficial and not harmful to socialist transformation and socialist construction. 3. They should help to consolidate

and not undermine or weaken the people's democratic dictatorship. Four, they should help to consolidate and not undermine or weaken democratic centralism. Five, they should help to strengthen and not shake off or weaken the leadership of the Communist Party. And six, they should be beneficial and not harmful to the international socialist unity and the unity of the peace-loving people of the world. And then he goes on to talk about why these are essential. And I think those are good criteria because there can be a million different ways of creating art or thinking or strategizing genuine good faith attempts to advance certain lines or causes but that as long as they follow these guardrails can be constructive

but like you know the first one is like yeah what's the opposite of uniting nationalities it's racism it's identitarian division it's needless um fostering of resentment between different nationalities instead of the real hard struggle of unifying those nationalities around common goals working through contradictions, right? What's the harm against international socialist unity? National chauvinism, the putting down of other people, you know, any attempt to want to dominate or impose on other people around the world, your way of seeing things. Okay, yeah, that's obviously not aligned with our thoughts. Anything that weakens communism, and the socialist struggle, the attempt to construct socialism, right?

Those things are directly and openly hostile to the core premises of what we're trying to do. And as long as you can abide by those things, then that shows that your general intent here is towards unity and is towards the advancement of society and socialist construction. And as long as that's okay, then, yeah, Mao in this text is opening up debate and art and the flourishing of different ideas. And I think that's a good sort of, that's a good criteria list. Yeah, no, I agree. And I mean, I think, you know, ultimately, these are complicated historical questions because

the history of the Chinese revolution is complicated, right? What's kind of fascinating is that different Marxists will look at all this and say, okay, well, you know, they'll disagree on where this path led. Is China Socialist Today? Is China not socialist today? Did these ideas about criticism land us to one point or another? And these are open and complex debates. I think what's important about this text and what's important about looking at the historical

experiments is that we acknowledge the fact that, yeah, when you do revolution, these are questions you have to wrestle with, right? You don't ever have to think about what are the limits of criticism. What is my six point list of kind of how we should understand the criteria for criticism when all you do is write books and live in an ivory tower, right? These are the kind of complicated things that happen when theory. meets the real world. And fascinatingly in this text, when that works successfully to spark a revolution. And so I'm not going to tell people, like, you have to approve or disapprove of

this or that aspect of the Chinese revolution. But I do think you have to study this. You have to learn from this. Because my God, if you believe that you are a part of a movement that could someday succeed, well, that movement will have to face these exact questions as well. And so hopefully that can create, you know, even if you're kind of squeamish about the idea of like six criteria, that can help you understand why studying these is worthwhile. Yeah, absolutely. And the big thing I also want to emphasize, as we're kind of getting towards the end here,

we have one more section to go, but that all of these ideas, unity, struggle, unity, antagonism versus non-antagonism, chauvinism, and how it weakens movements, this pendulum dialectic between open debate, democratic open debate, and resisting certain, obviously opportunist trends or hostile trends.

these all can be prefigured in socialist organizing right now right now obviously mao is operating on a world historical revolutionary stage but these happen in the seed beds of socialist organizations right here and now if you're involved in any organization you can put these things into practice now prefigure them and that makes them able to scale up in the future which are going which is going to be necessary so these are not things you have to wait around for a world historical revolution to put into practice, these are things that are prefigured in socialist organizing right here and now. And if you and your comrades working on any issue can get together and try to put these into practice, work through some of the difficulties, work through some of the contradictions,

try to resolve them in this way, you are training yourselves in your cadre to be the sort of socialist organizers that will be utterly necessary going forward. And so this is not theoretical or abstract or in the future all these things can be put into practice at a smaller scale admittedly right here and now and I think that's important to emphasize. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's crucial. I was going to do the good bad, or bad things turn into good. The basic point is very clear that crises are opportunities, right? And that's

where the famous Mao line of World War III, you know, we don't want it to happen but World War I gave rise to the Bolsheviks. World War II gave rise to the Chinese Revolution. And if the imperialist and insists on World War III, millions more might turn to socialism, and imperialism would dig its own grave. And so throughout this little part of the section, he is just saying that crises, collapse, imperial wars, they are horrific events. But at the exact same time, dialectically, they open up brand new vistas of opportunity. And we've talked about that on Red Menace over and over and over again, that as American capitalism has economic collapse, has climate collapse, has these economic shocks, imperial wars of aggression,

as the whole system is delegitimized, as they cut themselves off more and more from the basic interests of everyday working people, that they simultaneously create the conditions of their own overthrowing. And it's ultimately up to us, though, to take advantage of that. Because if we do not, then what these openings revert to is some form of fascism. That when socialism fails to take advantage of capitalism in crisis and move things forward, fascism will step in and drag things back. And we've seen that happen in the German Revolution, for example. So this is a real thing to be concerned about. But it's also a pill against dumerism. Because even though you look at look at the American world and the world at large and see things getting worse and worse and

worse, well, what do you think would presage socialist transformation, if not the collapse of the old system, right? And so Mao was just making that point. And I don't, we don't need to go too far into it. We've talked about it on many other episodes, but it's worth keeping in mind. Yeah. And I think it is worth you in mind as that pill against demurism, like you said, because things are bleak in our world, right? They obviously are. And we obviously are seeing contradictions play out globally on these horrific scales, whether that's imperialist intervention across the globe, whether that's the genocide in Gaza, whether you're in the U.S. and you're seeing what's happening here with more climate catastrophe. affecting people here, like what happened with the floods in Texas. If you're seeing the

conflicts in Los Angeles that are occurring around ICE deportations, if you're seeing all of these things, it can be very overwhelming. But I think it is important to emphasize that in all of these cases, that is opportunity in that we have to be able to respond. And I do just kind of want to emphasize that I feel very hopeful, honestly. I think I feel quite hopeful about the development of socialism and the development of this broader movement. in the United States right now. It is something that, you know, I have been involved in for most of my adult life. I've been around, and I'm seeing just levels of organizational development that really are

kind of incredible and higher levels of organizational complexity, coalition work across different left-wing groups in response to these crises. And yeah, you know, there is just quite a lot of reason for hope, I think. And I think as these coalitions develop and as this broader movement tries to solidify and to something stronger that's not just responding to crises, but is, you know, actually able to contend against the system which produces the crises. Questions about unity, questions about criticism, questions about how we relate to each other and struggle are going to become more and more and more concrete in demanding every single day. And, you know, I want to just

kind of push, and I think this is the thing we've always pushed on this podcast, this idea that while practice is central and you do have to go out and do something, you can't neglect history, you can't neglect theory. There are lessons that, thankfully, the people of China already wrestled through that will be very, very applicable in the practice that you are engaging in. And so I feel hopeful. I think things are developing in complexity and moving forward. And I think learning the lessons that the comrades who came before us wrote down in text like this

is actually even more necessary than ever because of that. Beautifully said. And as always, the thing that we are always pushing on this show, the number one antidote personally in your personal life to despair is to stop being a passive consumer of crisis and collapse on your phones and your screens and to get active. Every single person I've talked to over years of doing shows like this say that they pulled themselves out of pits of despair and blackpilling and dumerism simply by getting out and getting active, getting involved with other people who share your values, who are fighting for the same things, solving real. problems in your community, that gets you out of this passive absorption, staring into your misery screen, watching the world collapse and feeling utterly helpless, getting out among people, forming relationships, forming bonds, through struggle, solving problems, that on the personal

level is the antidote to despair and it's the seedbed from which higher forms of organization can develop into the future. So if you are susceptible to domerism and despair, put down the phone and get active in any capacity you don't have to solve the whole world's problems you know but you can solve real problems in your community right now and that is throwing your penny in the broader well of organizations all over the world who are working in the same exact directions and those things do link up over time and that is quantity into quality right we build up enough quantity of organization that spills over into a qualitative shift of that organization and that can lead to a qualitative shift in the nature of society overall. So get active in any way.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how much more I have to add to that, honestly. I mean, I think that is like the key takeaway, right? Like, that really is what matters. And I think it's a beautiful statement of applying what seems like this abstract philosophical principle of dialectics about the transformation of quality into quality into this practical reality of what it means on the ground. And so, you know, again, this is what I've always hoped we on this show can insist is that practice and theory ought not be at odds with each other, but in fact are necessarily complimentary for each other. And yeah, I think, like you said, kind of the solution to doomerism. Yeah. All right. Anything else you want to, do you want to touch on that last part,

or do you think we're good for today? What are your thoughts? I'll probably just call it here, I think. The last section is sort of just about economic development, but I think I don't know how much it will add to the direction we've gone in with the episode. I agree. And as always, this is free on Marxist.org. You can read the whole text. Exactly. It's really not that long of text. It's a speech. It's an essay. So you can sit down in one reading and get through this thing and hopefully fill out some of the sections that we might not have had to have addressed on this episode. But I think we touched the main points and we tried to make them applicable to our contemporary moment and our responsibility here and now, learning from the comrades of the past

and trying to apply those lessons. So yeah, any last words, Alison, as we wrap up here? yeah no i mean as always thank you for listening to brett and i kind of do this you know we haven't necessarily in the last like year and a half done so many texts and i feel like recently we've been trying to return to doing texts and i really am enjoying that and finding that a really useful approach to things um you know on the various platforms where we have this if there are texts that you want us to look at let us know too because we're always going back and forth about what we should talk about next but i just really appreciate getting to do this in the way where we get hands on with these specific theoretical works so yeah that's kind of just my thoughts on it yeah and i do have to

say that our recent dialectics of nature episode is one of my favorite that we've ever done yeah um it's one of one of the texts or the episodes that i'm most proud of across everything i've ever done and so if you haven't listened to that episode i would go i would go check it out i i think we're both very proud of that and that was our last our last episode um but yeah we'll continue to do text and when when big events arise we'll continue to address those and try to help people think through them in real time. Thank you to everybody that supports the show and we'll keep doing this show as long as there are people out here who find it useful. So love and solidarity. Stay safe out there.

So, I'm going to be able to be. You know what I'm going to do.