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Musings Report 2021-13 3-27-21 Why Cultural Revolutions Are Different--and More Dangerous
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Why Cultural Revolutions Are Different--and More Dangerous
What's the difference between a political revolution and a cultural revolution?
Since the two may intertwine or overlap, the differences are not always apparent.
China offers a useful modern example of the difference, as China's political revolution reached its culmination in 1949 while its Cultural Revolution occurred almost two decades later (1966 to 1976).
China's political revolution was a lengthy process, beginning with the Communist Party's first meeting in Shanghai in 1921. (The site of the meeting is now a museum, which I visited on my first trip to China in 2000. I bought a wooden folding fan as a souvenir.)
From the initial organizing meeting to military/political victory took almost 30 years.
Revolutionaries are rarely (if ever in the modern era) impoverished peasants/serfs; revolutionaries arise from the aspirational educated class--if not a middle class in current terms, a class with more resources, education and aspirations than landless, poorly educated peasants.
Both Mao and Chou en-Lai fit this profile, as did Lenin.
Political revolutions require centralized organization, to organize cadres, cells and platforms/propaganda, and military action should that prove necessary.
Centralized political parties are hotbeds of rivalries and conflicting loyalties and strategies, and the victorious clique typically conducts numerous purges to eliminate rivals and competing interpretations of the new ideology.
Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party purges began shortly after the founding, and continued on long past the revolution's victory in 1949.
The political revolution in America that led to military conflict with Great Britain (The Revolutionary War) arose within the educated ranks of society, and the differences of opinion on how to manage America's relationship with London eventually led to an either-or choice for everyone in this class: either join the revolution or remain a Loyalist. There was no middle ground.
Roughly 40% of the colonies' populace remained Loyal to the crown, and this broke up families (including Ben Franklin's), friendships and enterprises.
Establishing a centralized political power in America (1787) took six years after the military victory (1781), as the various states' revolutionaries (and militaries) were more like quasi-independent allies cooperating with one another rather than subordinates taking orders from a central party.
Political revolutions can effect profound cultural changes, of course; when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power, they abolished the worst abuses of the Imperial era (prostitution, foot-binding, warlords, Imperialist ownership of assets, etc.) and promoted an idealistic, egalitarian vision that was enthusiastically embraced by most of China's populace.
In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the cultural changes included the rejection of monarchy and aristocracy and the embrace of Enlightenment ideals that many saw playing out in Revolutionary France.
China's Cultural Revolution was remarkably different from the Party's military-political victory of 1949.
The Cultural Revolution is not an approved topic in China today, and that alerts us to its importance.
Although ostensibly launched by Mao (as part of his 1966 purge of Party rivals), the Cultural Revolution very quickly devolved into a decentralized, semi-chaotic movement of Red Guards, students and other groups who shared ideas and programs but who acted quite independent of the Party's central leadership. (In systems language, semi-chaotic dynamics are emergent properties.)
If you examine Mao's statements that supposedly launched The Cultural Revolution, you'll find they're not much different from his many pronouncements in the 1950s and early 1960s, none of which sparked a violent national upheaval. The Cultural Revolution cannot be traced back to Mao's control or plans; rather, Mao served as the "politically untouchable inspiration" for whatever measures the local cadres deemed necessary in terms of advancing (or cleansing) the people's revolution.
The important point here is that the Cultural Revolution was not controlled by the political authorities, even as they maintained control of the Party and central government hierarchy. But this was nothing more than an illusion of control: the forces of the Cultural Revolution had broken free of central command and control, even as the Red Guards expressed their loyalty to Mao and the principles of the Party.
That's the irony of Cultural Revolutions: the authorities cannot claim it is a political counter-revolution because the cultural revolutionaries proclaim their loyalty to the ideals and principles the authorities claim to be upholding.
Cultural Revolutions in effect claim the higher ground, eschewing political influence for direct action in the name of furthering the ideals which the authorities have abandoned or betrayed.
Given the fragmentary nature of The Cultural Revolution, the history is equally fragmentary--especially given the official reticence.
A recent academic book, Agents of Disorder: Inside China’s Cultural Revolution (2020), provides granular detail on the fragmented, decentralized, rapidly evolving dynamics of the movement:
"(The author) devoted decades to examining the local records of nearly all of China’s 2,000-plus county-level jurisdictions. He found that factions emerged from the splintering, rather than the congealing, of class-based groups. Small clusters of students, workers, and cadres struggling to respond to Mao’s shifting directives made split-second decisions about whom to align with. Political identities did not shape the conflict; they emerged from it. To explain this process of identity formation, he offers a theory of 'factions as emergent properties' and suggests that similar dynamics may characterize social movements everywhere."
In other words, groups modified their alliances, identities and definitions of "class enemies" on the fly, entirely free of central authorities. Factions splintered, regrouped and splintered again. In the chaos, no one was safe.
Consider two of the many personal accounts I've heard from friends who lived through The Cultural Revolution. Even in the privacy of their homes in the U.S., their voices become hushed and their reluctance to speak of those experiences is evident.
In one family, the father was an acrobat in a government troupe which gave performances in Warsaw Pact (eastern European) countries as part of the Party's goodwill efforts in other Communist nations.
For the "crime" (or perhaps "sin" is the more accurate word) of traveling outside China, the acrobat was put under house arrest for a number of years and treated roughly while imprisoned. Note that the acrobat was a valued representative of the nation and government, selected for the honor of foreign performances by the appropriate government agency. Yet neither the Party nor the central government could protect him.
In another family, the father was a mid-rank officer in the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA), which one might presume was off-limits to the predations of youthful Red Guards. But even the PLA was no protection, as the father (a respected Army officer) was also imprisoned. How could the nation's vast military fail to protect its officers from the chaos? It had lost control, too.
Many other family stories include mistreatment, illness brought on by harsh conditions and death.
The unifying theme in my view is the accused belonged to some "counter-revolutionary" elite--or they were living vestiges of a pre-revolutionary elite (children of the landlord class, professors, etc.)--and it was now open season on all elites, presumed or real.
What generated such spontaneous violence on such a national scale?
My conclusion is that cultural revolutions result from the suppression of legitimated political expression and the failure of the regime to meet its lofty idealistic goals.
Cultural revolutions are an expression of disappointment and frustration with the progress of improving everyday life, frustrations that have no outlet in a repressive regime which views dissent as treason and/or blasphemy.
By 1966, China's progress since 1949 had been at best uneven, and at worst catastrophic: the Great Leap Forward caused the deaths of millions due to malnutrition and starvation, and other centrally planned programs were equally disastrous for the masses.
Given the quick demise of the "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom" movement of open expression, young people realized there was no avenue for dissent within the Party, and no way to express their frustration with the Party's failure to fulfil its idealistic goals and promises.
When there is no relief valve in the pressure cooker, it's eventually released in a Cultural Revolution that unleashes all the bottled-up frustrations on elites which are deemed politically vulnerable. These frustrations have no outlet politically because they're "incorrect" or threatening to the status quo.
All these repressed emotions will find some release and expression, and whatever avenues are blocked by authorities will channel the frustrations into whatever is left open.
A Cultural Revolution takes the diversity of individuals and identities and reduces them into an abstraction which gives the masses permission to criticize the abstract class that "deserves" whatever rough justice is being delivered by the Cultural Revolution.
As the book review excerpt noted, the definition of who deserves long overdue justice shifts with the emergent winds, and so those at the head of the Revolution might find themselves identified as an illegitimate elite that must be unseated.
I submit that these conditions exist in the U.S.: the systemic failure of the status quo to deliver on idealized promises and the repression of dissent outside "approved" boundaries.
What elite can be criticized without drawing the full repressive powers of the central state? What elite will it be politically acceptable to criticize? I submit that "the wealthy" are just such an abstract elite.
To protect itself, a repressive status quo implicitly signals that the masses can release their ire on an abstract elite with indistinct boundaries--a process that will divert the public anger, leaving the Powers That Be still in charge.
But just as in China's Cultural Revolution, central authorities will quickly lose control of conditions on the ground. They will maintain the illusion of control even as events spiral ever farther from their control. The falcon will no longer hear the falconer.
In other words, once the social pressure cooker valve gives way, then the unleashed forces soon grasp that there are few limits on what they can criticize as long as they do so within an implicitly approved narrative--for example, "the wealthy" hoarded wealth and power and so it is right and just to claw it back by whatever means are available. Since the government failed to do so, the people will have to do so.
America has never had a Cultural Revolution, though it has had many periods of civil unrest.
The extreme inequalities of wealth and power that are now the dominant dynamic in America are heating the cultural pressure cooker, and when the pressure can no longer be contained, then being recognized as wealthy will shift very quickly from something desirable to something to avoid at all costs.
The lesson of China's Cultural Revolution in my view is that once the lid blows off, everything that was linear (predictable) goes non-linear (unpredictable, fragmented, contingent, emergent, prone to extremes, uncontrollable). If America experiences a Cultural Revolution, the outcome won't lend itself to tidiness or predictability.
To use an analogy from previous blog posts, if the pendulum is pushed to an extreme, when it's released, it will reach an equivalent extreme (minus a bit of friction) at the opposite end. That could be an unexpected but entirely foreseeable Cultural Revolution.
To the best of my knowledge, the potential for an emergent cultural revolution in the U.S. is unique to my work. It seems nobody else even considers it in the realm of remote possibility. The next five years will reveal who's forecast was most prescient.
Highlights of the Blog
Podcasts:
Disconnects between the Economy and the Financial Markets (FRA Roundtable, 41 min)
Posts:
Do We Really Think a Band-Aid Will Heal a Tumor? 3/25/21
Welcome to the Winter of Our Discontent 3/24/21
We Don't Need The Great Reset, We Need The Great Rebalancing 3/22/21
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
As mundane as it may be, what a relief to finish my taxes and mail the return (and payment...)
From Left Field
A Superpower, Like It or Not: Why Americans Must Accept Their Global Role
China's rural revolution: the architects rescuing its villages from oblivion
We’re Hurtling Toward Global Suicide: Why we must do everything differently to ensure the planet’s survival -- wait, are you saying infinite growth on a finite planet isn't possible?
The Weather Underground’s Lasting Victory
A Useful Kind of Madness--interesting analogy of the Wright brothers...
The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions (via Maoxian)
The Collapse of Lehman Brothers: A Case Study --deja vu all over again...
Defund Big Tech, Refund Community --yes and yes...
Powell in WSJ Op-ed: “I Truly Believe that We [the Rich] Will Emerge from this Crisis Stronger and Better, as We [the Rich] Have Done so Often Before” -- well said, Wolf...
The Pandemic Ignited a Housing Boom--but It’s Different From the Last One
The Future Is Decentralized (via T.D.)
The World’s Three Biggest Coal Users Get Ready to Burn Even More-- so much for alt energy replacing hydrocarbons...
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." Richard Feynman (via Caravaggio Bolo)
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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