#cultural revolution

[thererisesaredstar]

Helping mama study

Yu Yunjie (1956)

[sanminzhuyi]

Red Guards during Cultural Revolution.

[safije]

Kurban Tulum (قۇربان تۇلۇم) (1883-1975) an Uyghur peasant who worked as a seasonal labourer for Uyghur landlords. During the land reforms of 1952, Kurban received land and various other properties. He is said to have visited Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, by riding a donkey, to show his appreciation for the People's Liberation Army.

The People's Republic of China promotes him as a symbol of unity between the Uyghurs and Han Chinese. A song named "Where Are You Going, Uncle Kurban?" (库尔班大叔您去哪儿?) and a film titled Uncle Kurban Visits Beijing (库尔班大叔上北京) were produced in 2002. Monuments of Kurban's handshake with Mao stand in the town centres of Keriya and Hotan (Tuanjie Square).

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

'Long Live the Red Terror!' (1966)

Wuhan Workers Rebel General Headquarters, People's Republic of China

Via GPCR Podcast

[keyofnow]

The White Album diary

The Beatles, a.k.a. “The White Album”, was recorded and produced in exactly 20 weeks from 30 May to 17 October 1968.

Notes On The Esher Demos Week 0: India to Esher, and “Revolution” Week 1: More “Revolution 1”, and “Don't Pass Me By” Week 2: “Blackbird”, and then the calm before the storm Week 3: Paul's birthday, “Revolution 9”, and Paul goes AWOL Week 4: “Sour Milk Sea” and “Everybody's Got Something To Hide...” Week 5: Stirrings of “Good Night” and “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da” Week 6: Remakes of “Ob-La-Di” and “Revolution” Progress Report #1: How their workflow compares to Sgt. Pepper Week 7: “Cry, Baby, Cry”, and Geoff Emerick quits Week 8: “Good Night” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Week 9: “Hey Jude” at Trident Week 10: “Not Guilty” and “Mother Nature's Son” Progress Report #2: At the halfway point Week 11: “Sexy Sadie”, “Yer Blues”, “Mary Jane”, “Rocky Raccoon” Week 12: “Wild Honey Pie”, “Back In The U.S.S.R.”, and Ringo quits Week 13: “Dear Prudence” at Trident Week 14: Ringo returns, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” remake Week 15: Enter Chris Thomas, “Helter Skelter”, and “Glass Onion” Week 16: “I Will”, “Birthday”, and “Piggies” Week 17: “Happiness Is A Warm Gun” Progress Report #3: Crunch time in Pepperland Week 18: “Honey Pie”, “Savoy Truffle”, and “Martha...”, all at Trident Week 19: “Long...”, “...Tired”, “...Bungalow Bill”, “...Do It In The Road?” Week 20: “Julia”, final overdubs, and marathon sequencing sesh The White Album Sessions In Review

And of course, the Get Back sessions kicked off exactly 11 weeks after the last White Album session. So in a very real way, the “White Album Beatles” are exactly who we're hanging with at Twickenham and Apple in January 1969...

🍏

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Trump has become an American Chairman Mao and this is his Cultural Revolution. This time it's not a little red book they're following, it's the big book that was prepared by the Heritage Foundation for exactly the purpose of what's happening right now all over Washington DC.

It was said that Chairman Mao launched his Cultural Revolution to purge his government of people who clung to traditional Chinese ways and practices that smacked of so-called capitalist elements. Every dictator who sees himself as a supreme being entitled to absolute power has his own reasons for what he does. Mao was obsessed with creeping capitalism that he thought infected Chinese society. With Trump -- and you hear it every day coming out of his mouth and the mouths of Co-Chairman Musk and the rest of Trump's MAGA lackeys -- the obsession is liberalism, which they cover with the rubric of DEI and something they call but never quite define: wokeism. They don't have to define it. They've got their MAGA base and the Republicans in Congress trained at this point to react exactly the way they want them to react when they hear the word woke or wokeism or DEI or Marxist any of the other catch phrases they've warped for their own purposes.

Chairman Mao used cadres of Red Guards to carry out his revolution. I remember reading stories back in the late 60s, after the Cultural Revolution had taken hold, of young members of the Red Guards going to their own homes in places like Beijing and Shanghai and arresting their own parents, whose crimes were being university professors senior researchers in government health agencies and the like. Does that sound familiar? I haven't seen anything yet about purges at the NIH but just wait until RFK Jr. moves into his office at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. Reporters may have to use numbers with quadruple digits to write the stories about the firings that'll take place there.

Trump isn't following the Mao playbook of using young people and college students to do his dirty work. No, he's got Elon Musk and his battering ram of functionaries --who are unelected and do not hold government jobs -- to tear through the government for him.

But Trump is not without his own Red Guards. He just let their leaders out of prison with pardons and commutations. Enrique Tarrio is a free man now, ready to retake his position running the Proud Boys. So is Stewart Rhodes, free as a bird, back at the helm of the Oath Keepers. Stunningly, MSNBC aired a documentary tonight, February 2nd, with the glorifying title “King of the Apocalypse” about Rhodes. I didn't watch it and probably you didn't either, but you didn't have to if you tuned into MSNBC this week where they ran trailers around the clock advertising their documentary with a shot of Rhodes wearing camouflage, picturing him as a kind of twisted Patton.

Be ashamed of yourself, MSNBC. You're playing right into these fuckers’ hands.

It's scary to contemplate, but there is probably a whole panoply of right-wing militias that are in one stage or another of forming as we speak. Trump told his violent extremists to “stand back and stand by” during the 2020 election campaign. Little did we know that they were just waiting for his orders on January 6. I think it's safe to say that we're not going to hear those words from Trump this time around, because Trump appears to have learned a lesson on January 6: Don't wait until the last minute. This time, Trump is moving with lightning speed. His stormtroopers have their headquarters in the White House Executive Office Building. Their leader, the odious Musk, has been welcomed into The West Wing where he has an office upstairs from the Oval Office.

Dear readers, this is a nightmare I don't think we're going to wake up from anytime soon. The Founders of our country described the democratic system they sought to form as a “government of laws, not of men.” With Donald Trump's January 6 pardons and commutations, with his appointment of the likes of Kash Patel to run the FBI, with Hegseth ready to put the military in the street anytime Trump orders him, we have lost that noble dream of our Founding Fathers. One day in the not too distant future, unless some lawsuits are filed by brave civil servants and groups like the ACLU and the Democratic Party gets its act together, we won't have the federal government anymore. We won't have school lunch programs and Head Start and research for new cures for cancer and development of plans to be ready for the next pandemic. I could go on with what will be missing from our government and our lives, but you get the picture.

I don't know what our country will become, but it won't be recognizable as the United States of America we have loved for 240 years.

[shihlun]

Writers Yukio Mishima, Kobo Abe, Jun Ishikawa, and Yasunari Kawabata reading the statement "Regarding the Cultural Revolution in China, it is imperative to preserve the self-discipline of learning and art" at a press conference. Photographed at the Hotel Imperial, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 28 February 1967.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Paul Krugman:

Donald Trump has been treated very, very badly. At least that’s what he says all the time, and there’s no reason to doubt that it’s how he feels. Hardly a day goes by without an outburst like this: Above all, he clearly feels rage toward people who, he imagines, think they’re smarter or better than him. And he and the movement he leads, composed of people possessed by similar rage, are seeking retribution. Retribution against whom? Yes, they hate wokeness. But three months in, it’s obvious that the MAGA types want revenge not just on their political opponents but on everyone they consider elites — a group that, as they see it, doesn’t include billionaires, but does include college professors, scientists and experts of any kind. It took no time at all for the Trumpists to move from trying to purge government agencies of DEI to trying to control the content of medical journals. [...] If you want a model for what’s happening to America, think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But wait, wasn’t Mao hard left while America has been taken over by the hard right? Well, why do you think there’s a big difference between the two? I’m a believer in horseshoe theory, which says that the extreme left and the extreme right are more like each other than either is like the political center. For example, among Britain’s unions there is a hard-left faction that has no counterpart in the United States. Some of its positions, notably making apologies for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, look a lot like MAGA. And in America some leftist commentators have effectively become spokesmen for the tech-bro right. Once you’ve seen the parallel between what MAGA is trying to do and China’s Cultural Revolution, the similarities are everywhere. Maoists sent schoolteachers to do farm labor; Trumpists are talking about putting civil servants to work in factories. [...] The Trumpists are surely the same. Their rampage will, if unchecked, have dire economic consequences. Right now we’re all focused on tariff madness, but undermining higher education and crippling scientific research will eventually have even bigger costs. But don’t expect them to care, or even to acknowledge what’s happening. Trump has already declared that the inflation everyone can see with their own eyes is fake news. There is, however, one big difference between Chairman Mao in 1966 and President Trump in 2025: Trump probably — probably — doesn’t have the cards.

Paul Krugman wrote a good Substack column on how Trump’s MAGA Cultural Purge is disturbingly similar to the Maoist-era China.

[last-tarrasque]

what exactly does marxism-leninism-maoism add to marxism-leninism? i know part of it is the theory of protracted peoples war but honestly that seems like it would only work in countries with larger rural areas. this isn't me trying to disprove you or anything i just don't think i understand maoism. (i've also heard mixed opinions on abimael guzman from some people so i'm curious about him too)

That is a great question! The advancements of Maoism can be split into two main categories. The first category is the qualitative advancements with build on the core of Marxism, and mark the transformation of Marxism-Leninism into Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. The second is the advances which advance Maoism itself, but do not propel revolutionary science into a qualitatively higher stage.

In terms of the first category, three main advancements were made which qualitatively advanced the knowledge of revolutionary science along the lines of the three essential aspects of Marxism. These were made during the 3rd world historic revolution, that being the Chinese Revolution, up till the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. These are;

Advancements in the field of Political Economy: Chairman Mao Zedung was the first to seriously advance the study of imperialism beyond the great discoveries of Lenin and analyze Imperialism in it's modern Semi-Colonial form. This investigation led to the discovery of Bureaucrat-Comprador Capitalism and Semi-Feudalism, the ruling classes within Semi-Colonies.

Advancements in the field of Class Struggle 1: Following the analysis of Bureaucrat-Comprador Capitalism and Semi-Feudalism, along with analysis of both the RUssian and Chinese Revolution's, Mao discovered a crucial revolutionary stage for all countries under the boot of feudalism and imperialism, that of the New Democratic Revolution. The NDR is a national revolution against Feudalism and Imperialism headed principally by the Proletariat, in alliance with all progressive classes of society, including the national bourgeoises (For example the CPC-Kuomintang united fount against the Japanese, or the united front against the Tzar in Russia) The NDR must be completed before socialist revolution can occur.

Advancements in the field of Class Struggle 2: Another Key advancement of Mao was the discovery that, contrary to popular opinion at the time, class struggle continues under socialism. Under socialism new bureaucratic bourgeoisie emerge from within the party and state structure (following the principle of one dividing into two) and from remaining inequalities in society (following the principle of unequal development). Following the defeat of soviet socialism buy such forces and the rise of Khrushchevite Revisionism, and even the rise of such Revisionism in the CPC, Mao and the socialist line in the party waged a struggle against Khrushchtevite Revisionism and later internal revolution, culminating with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The GPCR targeted both old feudal and capitalist structures as well as the new bourgeoisie who promoted the capitalist line in the party, and pushed the development of socialism to its farthest point so far (which is why it the 3rd world historic revolution).

Advancements in the field of Dialectical Materialism: Mao's book On Contradictions is edental reading for any serious communist, it contains Mao's contribution to the philosophical foundations of Marxism. It puts forward key concepts such as the relationship between antagonistic and non antagonistic contradiction, differentiates between principle and secondary contractions, and the universality and particularity of contractions. Mao also puts forward in other works how contractions should be handled. Contradictions amongst the people vs contradictions with ractionares, and importantly contractions between the masses and the party, which is solved with the mass line.

There is also the topic of People's War, however that is a topic I personally do not know enough about yet in order to speak on it with any authority. After all, no investigation, no right to speak.

[stan-rabelais-et-diderot]

Small thoughts on the Netflix Three Body Problem adaptation

1) We are making it international" they said. They replaced all the international collaboration, the counsel of world leaders that we see throughout the books with... two British dudes deciding everything by themselves, not accountable to anyone. They managed to make it less international than the book. But more than that, they perverted the very themes Liu Cixin wove into his books, the very ideas the books revolve on: group mentality & collaboration versus the individual, banal or exceptional. The Netflix show removed the very notion of collective, of group mentality, without which there is nothing to contrast individuality against.

2) They made Ye Wenjie an unrecognizable shell of herself. Her back is not held up straight. An old Ye Wenjie, cursing, sloushing, moving to England. Is it really Ye Wenjie? It bothers me so much that they could get away with saying this is Ye Wenjie. This is not her.

3) They "simplified" the science to a point where nothing is explained, nothing can survive through any kind of analysis of the logic of the things shown & the actions taken. Just one example, because I’ve seen the headset being praised for looking “cool”. It’s not cool if it’s at the expense of a logical plot. The futurist headsets we are shown imply that either 1° the Trisolarians are able to send sizable physical objects [which they physically can't, the limit to what they could send through space is clearly explained, it is the two protons they did send Earth] or 2° the Trisolarians shared schematics of advanced technology with the ETO, letting them to develop the headsets. But that is the one thing the Trisolarians would never do, as their entire plan rely on humans’ technology not being able to develop any further than it already has.

4) I thought it was gonna be lesser than the Tencent show. I didn't expect it to be so utterly lacking on all front. If there was one point of worthy comparison, one point where I expected Netflix to do a good job, if only to show they had a bigger budget, it was “the” boat scene. Tencent spent 25% of their budget on that scene, so I expected Netflix would try to make their boat scene more spectacular, better on a technical level, to show that the US special effects are undefeated or something. I would have never expected that they wouldn’t even try to compete. That scene happened in the episode 5 of the Netflix show & it’s underwhelming. It has no gravitas, but of course it can’t have any gravitas, it’s not the culmination of the collaboration of humans across the globe, demonstrating that they can fight back & achieve greatness when they are united, of course it can’t be the same when it’s just 10 British people working in isolation. They didn’t just do something underwhelming on a technical level, they did something underwhelming on a narrative level. Just like the scene with the insects, the culmination of the Tencent show had no weigh & no impact when done by Netflix.

5) The misguided belief that somehow an American show could show Chinese history (the cultural revolution) to an international audience better & with more accuracy than a Chinese show to a Chinese audience because of the censorship in China is laughable. An international audience would need more context to understand a historical time that they or their parents didn’t live through, but that’s not what Netflix did. What they showed was mildly violent & shocking to be sure, but not very accurate to the content of the book. They cut out a lot of plot, but they could have done that, simplified it without stripping it of context or changing the story so much it resonates wrong. I'll just give small examples:

on the stage when they condemn Ye Wenjie's father (with microphones in front of a huge audience???) they keep saying "lies", which makes no sense, that's not the logic, the charge is propagating western propaganda, upholding western values & a capitalist way of thinking, not lying (see the end of page note on that point).

they call Ye Wenjie comrade during her time at the Red Coast (in the book [& in the Tencent show] her status as a political dissident & therefore NOT a comrade is emphasized, stated explicitly. If you don't understand the social implication, let's simplify & say that being a comrade is like being a citizen, not a comrade, not part of the group, not trusted).

Netflix Ye Wenjie unironically says: "how awesome would it be if China was the first [country to make contact with aliens]". She says it, mind you, not in front of the political commissioner because she is asking for something & need to butter him up, no, she is just enthusiastically patriotic? She is shown to be enthousiastically patriotic toward China & LATER she sells out the planets to the Trisolarians.

The inconsistencies are not only baffling deviations from the source materials that display a complete lack of comprehension of Ye Wenjie as a character, as well as an astonishing disregard for the accuracy of the ideology of (Mao-area) communism & the history of Maoist China. They didn't show a lot of content, so they could have easily avoided making such basis mistakes.

What really pisses me off is that I keep seeing press pieces saying that the Netflix version “doesn’t shy away from showing”, “won't censor” the part of the story taking place during the Cultural Revolution, sometimes outright saying it as a reason to watch the Netflix version over the Tencent one, implying to the readers the Tencent version is heavily censored, when in reality the Tencent version spend a lot more time than on it than the Netflix one, showing how bad it was, in an accurate way, very close to the content of the book. The political rhetoric fallacies, the bureaucracy, the hypocrisy, how miserable everything is, is shown very well.

[Disclaimer, I'm not Chinese, it's not my culture, it’s not the country I live in. But in France there are Maoists, so I’ve learned just enough about the history of Mao & the Cultural Revolution to hold very negative views about it. In reverse, in a very racist, sinophobic way, many Westerners think Chinese people can’t think for themselves if they don’t hate every single thing about China & they lump in the country, the people & the Xi Jinping administration. It’s absurd to ask other people to hate their country, to have no pride in anything from their country. What hypocrisy, in every country, nationalism is taught to us from the time we first attend school. Patriotism is a requirement, it’s ingrained, internalized in all of us. We can be critical of our country’s history, of our government, or many things & still find pride & love for some things. I know that’s the way I feel about France.]

Censorship does exist in China, it’s exist materially in a way that differs from the Hays Code in the US in both the scope of its autority & its function. It is enacted by a governement agency called the NRTA & everything that airs on tv has to be clear by the NRTA first. A clear guideline is not provided, we know what passed it, creators know what didn’t, so to a lesser extent we know what doesn’t passes NRTA censorship: graphic violence, nudity, sex, ghosts (or BL since 2021...) et caetera. It would be dishonest to pretend that the topic of Cultural Revolution is a taboo that cannot be spoken about, as if the current administration has a positive view on it & would therefore not allow it to be criticized. What is censored (as far as we know, what is different from the book) in the Tencent show is the opening scene, a very graphic violent scene. That’s it. It’s censored, probably more for the violence than anything else. Some people find it disappointing, but the symbolic meaning of that violence in not hidden in the narrative & the event are instead visually & auditory implied in a short flashback at the end of one episode.

NB) In the opening scene of the Netflix show (the same one that was cut on Tencent), the political tribunal has someone accusing: "Lies, all lies!". But lying is not a political charge. It sounds ridiculous. They just had to follow the book, they didn’t have to understand communism, but no, they had to come up with things themselves... My best guess it that the creators didn’t realized that "lying is bad" is a cultural value that is not universal.

I don't know if "lying" is a big deal in China, but I know it's not a big deal in my culture & in a Marxist/communist political context, lying is just not "a thing". They are a lot of charges you can get in a political tribunal:

-individualist behavior,

-liberalism/imperialistic thinking,

- lack of self-criticism (Maoism famously has the three principles, one of which being the practice of self-criticism so you/we can do better).

-deceiving the masses with xx propaganda [so they don't revolt when they would if they knew the truth], that’s as close to lying is a political charge can get,

-aspiring to bourgeois comfort [that can mean profiting of other people's labor, not doing enough or not wanting to sacrifice your life for the cause],

- treason & of course

- being counterrevolutionary / working against the revolution, are the two big ones !

Can you see what is not on that list ? Lying is not on that list.

[maoistaesthetics]

Dazibao. 1967

大字报

[thererisesaredstar]

Wipe out illiteracy (1953)

[sanminzhuyi]

Chang'an Avenue in Beijing during Cultural Revolution, 1967.

Photo by Weng Naiqiang.

[oceanicmarxist]

Communist Red Guards in Tiananmen Square in Peking (Beijing), 1967

[keyofnow]

The Beatles workflow deep dive

As outlined in the previous post, sessions for every Beatles album yielded a certain number of released tracks, produced over a number of sessions during a given span of time. Here's a condensed outline:

Before the first album... Sessions: 4 Recorded: sporadically over six months (6 June to 26 Nov 1962). New releases: 4

Please Please Me Sessions: 1 Recorded: principally in one day (11 Feb 1963) New releases: 10

Between the albums... Sessions: 2 Recorded: in a pair of one-off sessions (5 March and 1 July 1963). New releases: 4

With The Beatles Sessions: 10 Recorded: across exactly 14 weeks (18 July to 23 Oct 1963). New releases: 16

A Hard Day's Night Sessions: 10 Recorded: across exactly 18 weeks (29 Jan to 3 June 1964). New releases: 17 Foreign language remakes: 2

Beatles For Sale Sessions: 8 Recorded: across 11 weeks (11 Aug to 26 Oct 1964). New releases: 16

Help! Sessions: 12 Recorded: across 17 and a half weeks (15 Feb to 17 June 1965). New releases: 17

Rubber Soul Sessions: 13 Recorded: in exactly one month (12 Oct to 11 Nov 1965). New releases: 15 Revived outtakes: 1 (from the Help! sessions)

Revolver Sessions: 22 Recorded: in exactly 12 weeks (6 April to 21 June 1966). New releases: 16

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Sessions: 67 Recorded: in roughly 21 weeks (24 Nov 1966 to 21 Apr 1967). New releases: 15

Between Sgt. Pepper and the White Album... Sessions: 59 Recorded: across nearly 42 weeks (25 Apr 1967 to 11 Feb 1968). New releases: 14 Outtakes: 2 (both of which would be revived by 1970)

The Beatles Sessions: 87 Recorded: in exactly 20 weeks (30 May to 17 Oct 1968). New releases: 32

(I'll stop there cuz everything gets more complicated after that, and anyway my focus has been on The White Album since it's the immediate backdrop of the Get Back sessions, which I can't get enough of.)

How does their workflow change from album to album?

Obviously the first album (PPM) is uniquely productive, even if the record was padded with a few already-released songs. 10 tracks in one session is almost unheard of for any artist.

The second album (WTB) yields 16 tracks in 10 sessions, setting the standard by which they'll judge their own progress for the next few years. The production average is about a song and a half per session.

The third album (AHDN) accelerates production with 19 tracks in 10 sessions, an average of nearly two songs per session.

The fourth album (B4S) picks up the pace even further with 16 tracks in 8 sessions, averaging exactly two songs per session. Apart from the first album, this is the fastest they work from session to session.

The fifth album (H!) shows the first deceleration with 17 tracks in 12 sessions. Production still averages more than one song per session.

The sixth album (RS) shows further deceleration with 16 tracks in 13 sessions, although it's their fastest overall production time since the first album. They still average more than one song per session.

The seventh album (R) nurtures 16 tracks in 22 sessions — twice their former standard. Their production average drops to fewer than one song per session — or, one and a half sessions per song.

The eighth album (SPLHCB) stretches time with 15 tracks in 67 sessions — six times their former standard. Production averages around four and a half sessions per song.

The ninth album (TB) picks up the pace again with 32 tracks in 87 sessions — nine times their former standard. Production averages a little under three sessions per song.

I don't know what else to say besides all that, but I'm sure I'll think of something....

🍏

[itty-clover]

abolish Israel, free Palestine, Palestinian reunification!