How state enumeration spoiled Mao’s last revolution

Abstract

The Cultural Revolution arguably was all about class and class struggle, which were enduring motifs throughout the Mao era. But what did class really mean, and how do we situate Mao’s “continuous revolution” in its historical context? Many scholars have argued that Mao’s project of continuous revolution, that is, the Cultural Revolution, was an active attempt to tackle the problem of the bureaucratic institutionalization of the Chinese Revolution and above all to forestall the rise of a new socialist ruling elite. This new-class interpretation of late Maoism and the Cultural Revolution is flawed in two crucial aspects. First of all, it overlooks the manifold ambiguities and incoherencies of the late Maoist ideology of class; and second, it fails to fully comprehend the political and ideological consequences of such ambiguities and fragmentariness as amplified by the specific historical and institutional context in which they were pragmatically received and enacted.This paper begins with a brief discussion of the contradictions and ambiguities of the Maoist discourse of class. It then examines the political and ideological consequences of such ambiguities by focusing on the ramifications of the institutional codification of class in post-1949 China. Artificially constructing and perpetuating a social field of antagonism that had largely ceased to exist by the 1960s, the discourse of the state-imposed class-status system was superimposed upon an emergent language of class critical of bureaucratic inequalities, an inchoate language which became assimilated into the existing class discourse based on a rigid classification of prerevolutionary sociopolitical distinctions. This entanglement of disparate forms of class analysis and practice had profound consequences during the Cultural Revolution, as discourses about old and new class adversaries—each with distinct structures of antagonism and developmental dynamics—became hopelessly confused.