Mao! Mao! : Review of Jean-Luc Godard's "La Chinoise"

"Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it." - Bertolt Brecht

As of this May, La Chinoise (1967), Jean-Luc Godard's classic film about the Maoist movement in France (based on Dostoevsky's book, The Devils), is now available on DVD! I just finished watching it for the first time, and I'd like to share a few initial thoughts, which, because of the film's freshness in my mind, are not very systematic.

First, I'd seen two of Godard's movies before: Breathless (1960), which I didn't care for, and Le Petit Soldat (also from 1960), which I enjoyed. So I wasn't sure what to expect, aside from a general idea that this was a somewhat experimental film about Maoism. Godard himself identified as a Maoist, and along with Jean-Paul Sartre, was gravitating around the Gauche Prolétarienne (GP). Additionally, this film had a big impact on French Maoism after the events of May 1968. It is characteristic of the ultraleft, however, in that it is fairly light on the Mass Line - "from the masses, to the masses" and all that.

One is reminded of a quote from Mao Zedong's Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art:

'To study Marxism means to apply the dialectical materialist and historical materialist viewpoint in our observation of the world, of society and of literature and art; it does not mean writing philosophical lectures into our works of literature and art. Marxism embraces but cannot replace realism in literary and artistic creation, just as it embraces but cannot replace the atomic and electronic theories in physics. Empty, dry dogmatic formulas do indeed destroy the creative mood; not only that, they first destroy Marxism. Dogmatic "Marxism" is not Marxism, it is anti-Marxism. Then does not Marxism destroy the creative mood? Yes, it does. It definitely destroys creative moods that are feudal, bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, liberalistic, individualist, nihilist, art-for-art's sake, aristocratic, decadent or pessimistic, and every other creative mood that is alien to the masses of the people and to the proletariat. So far as proletarian writers and artists are concerned, should not these kinds of creative moods be destroyed? I think they should; they should be utterly destroyed. And while they are being destroyed, something new can be constructed.'

Here is the Trailer:


While it is an interesting and entertaining film, perhaps targeted at Leftist students and young intellectuals, who were becoming more and more militant in those days, it does indeed seem to be "writing philosophical lectures into our works of literature and art". Godard attempts to incorporate into cinema some of Bertolt Brecht's Marxist theory of "epic" or "dialectical" theatre, which, through "estrangement effect" is all about art as presentation of philosophical arguement through dialogue, along with an audience that must be very conscious of itself as an audience (basically the opposite of "suspension of disbelief"). Godard put it like this in a famous quote: "I don't think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can't kiss a movie." It even includes direct shots of the camera and other tools of the trade so as not to allow the viewer to forget that they are watching a movie. It is not a subtle film, by any means, but Godard seems to have seen this somewhat in-your-face Brechtian style as necessary towards the destruction of all of those reactionary "creative moods" that Mao said "should be utterly destroyed" so that something new could be created.

It is also worth mentioning as a secondary point and especially for those who are not familiar with the pro-Chinese Marxist-Leninist movement in France, that the Maoist groups in France criticized the film for making individual terrorism (as opposed to mass actions and class struggle) the absolute and central question and making it appear as though the Maoists fetishized violence. This shows a great deal of the youthful impatience that the activists of the 60's felt in the face of the genocidal war in Vietnam on the one hand and the inspirational event of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the other. But this question of mass or individual violence is actually dealt with quite well in the scene on the train towards the close of the film. Here, in a dialogue between the protagonist, Véronique, and the militant philosophy professor, Francis Jeanson, the question is explored fully from both sides. I'm not going to spoil that for you though.

Here is an interesting and illustrative clip from the film showing the Maoists discussing the Vietnam war:


Like the Maoist GP with which Godard was associated, this is a very intellectual film. As one bourgeois reviewer put it, "La Chinoise is not an easily accessible film, in the same way that the Himalayas are not easily accessible for a casual stroll on a Thursday afternoon. Even within the sphere of other complicated works of Godard, this film requires serious educational cojones to appreciate its multilayered oblique narrative, the dense social theory spouted by its protagonists, the railing assault on Gaullist ideology, and the political context within the growing New Left movement of France in the 1960s. Expect to feel dumb. It is a normal side effect."

"Expect to feel dumb," may be a bit of an overstatement, but the discourse of the movie is at a pretty high level.

I would suggest that people see this film. It is a film about students inspired and stirred up by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and all the ideas and struggles surrounding it. And at the same time it is an experiment, by a film-maker likewise inspired, in artistic creation and destruction. Jean-Luc Godard's film, in his words, is attempting to break down a "capitalistic reactionary aesthetic" and create something new. For all of that, for the ideas it discusses and generates, and for the proletarian culture it seeks to help create, it is an excellent film.

For an opinion from the ultraleft regarding the film, you may as well check out the MIM movie review of La Chinoise while you're at it. They may be a little weird, and rather atypical as far as Maoism goes, with their "Maoist Third-Worldism" and all the rest, shunned as nuts by the rest of the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist movement. Nonetheless, let's give credit where credit's due; you gotta love their propensity for watching a lot of movies and writing about them, if nothing else!

View Post

Maoist Film from the Cultural Revolution: Breaking With Old Ideas

Breaking With Old Ideas is a Chinese film from 1975 about revolutionizing education in the countryside and trasforming in a fundamental way the way people relate to nature, to society as a whole, and to each other. This revolutionary film is now available for free viewing at You Tube. What you can see here is only part 1, the other 14 parts are linked below:

Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 2
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 3
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 4
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 5
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 6
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 7
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 8
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 9
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 10
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 11
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 12
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 13
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 14
Breaking With Old Ideas - Part 15

For studying Marxist-Leninist theory, this would be a wonderful film to watch along with such readings as Mao Zedong's essays, "On Practice", "Reform Our Study", "Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership", and "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People".

There is a lot of stuff in this movie to talk about. This movie was made so as to make such things as the Marxist theory of knowledge, the Mass Line, the concept of "red and expert", the concept of two-line struggle and continuing the revolution under socialism accessable to the broad masses of the people taking part in the revolution. We see in this film how contradictions sharpen under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and how class struggle not only continues, but deepens, under socialism. Breaking With Old Ideas is a movie about teaching and it is a movie for teaching. It is a film that interestingly and boldly tries to demonstrate and explain a Maoist pedagogy, and it does this very much in the style of the late period of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) when it was made. This film also shows a lot of the dynamic historical context that can sometimes be overlooked, giving one a small glimpse of what socialist construction can look like. It is also interesting to see the relationship between the Great Leap Forward (depicted in the film) and the GPCR during which the film was made.

A question that we should ask ourselves, and that we should keep in mind when watching this movie, would be what can we, as workers, as Communists, and as revolutionaries, learn from a film like this?

View Post

Revisionism and Capitalist Restoration: Contribution to the debate on the line of Freedom Road Socialist Organization

Some interesting discussion of revisionism and antirevisionism has come up lately, particularly in relation to the position put forward by Freedom Road Socialist Organization [Marxist-Leninist]. (People are using brackets these days it seems to distinguish by ideology the two groups that use the same name, the other being FRSO [Left Refoundationist]).

First Pottawatomie Creek (henceforth PC) struck at the line of the Marxist-Leninist FRSO (the publishers of Fight Back! Newspaper) with his article, FRSO [Fight Back!]'s Decent into Revisionism? to which Left Spot (LS) responded polemically in Debate on FRSO and Revisionism. Celtic Fire (CF) chimed in with Understanding Revisionism in an attempt to reopen the debate.

I'll summarize the debate thus far as I see it:

PC began by basically equating "revisionism" with not upholding the Left Refoundationists' Crisis of Socialism document, upholding the DPRK and the PRC as a socialist countries, and by referring to 1989 events in China as an attempted counter-revolution.

LS took note of these central points, and in my view, did pretty well at addressing them in his article.

Regarding the "Crisis of Socialism," LS addresses the defeatism of the statement.

While the statement makes some good points, its overall verdict on socialism in the 20th century is defeatist and is fundamentally wrong. The worst error of the Crisis statement is that it sums up all the efforts of socialist revolution in the 20th century as an overall failure. I quote: “overall the experience of building socialism in the Soviet Union must be summed up as a failure. All subsequent socialist revolutions have drawn to a great extent from the Soviet model, and the crisis of socialism is not confined to the Soviet Union.” This is straight-up wrong, and is drenched in the confusion and defeatism that much of the U.S. left succumbed to around 1991 when the statement was first adopted.

Regarding the socialist countries, LS notes some confusion regarding the Left Refoundationist line on the question.

And if they believe that Cuba is socialist [I understand there is a resolution put forward by FRSO [LR] to that effect], I would ask what FRSO [Left Refoundationist] sees as the distinction between the political economy of Cuba and that of, say, Vietnam, and why one is allegedly socialist and the other is allegedly capitalist.

And regarding the 1989 counter-revolutionary events at Tiananmen Square:

As for Tiananmen in 1989, would anyone deny that there were forces prominent, including some of the leadership, in the 1989 student movement that were aiming for Western-style capitalism? And that forces within the Chinese Communist Party that supported moving toward Western-style capitalism were working very closely with, and supporting, the protests?

He summed it all up, saying:

FRSO [ML] has successfully steered away from the many varieties of revisionism that have confounded many other groups. I think that compared to the alternatives, FRSO [ML] is the most advanced revolutionary organization in the US. FRSO [ML] is grounded in proletarian internationalism and Marxism-Leninism, incorporating key contributions of Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution. FRSO [ML] engages in dynamic mass work using the mass line better than anyone else on the US left (to be fair, FRSO [Left Refoundationist] has some mass work I’m familiar with that is also very good). FRSO [ML] maintains a regular bilingual publication (Fight Back Newspaper www.fightbacknews.org) that highlights advanced experience in mass struggles around the country and world. And FRSO [ML] sees the need for Leninist organization and is building toward a new communist party to lead revolution in the US. That is not revisionism – that is Marxism-Leninism.

That's the essense of it.

Time I made my little contribution.

I think we've been messing around with secondary contradictions for too long in these debates. Lets get down to principal.

While some want to contest that while FRSO does some really good mass work, it isn't communist mass work. This seems to be, from what I've heard, because of a percieved lack of ideological content in Fight Back! I presume this to be the case, as I don't think those who have raised this have encountered much of FRSO's mass work first hand. I've worked along side some of these people for a while though, and I'd say that its very revolutionary, and that while Fight Back! may not be tailored for a petite bourgeois "communist" readership, it does well as a mass line publication to build the struggle among rank & file workers.

But that's not the crux of the matter.

Again and again on the blogs (not only the above mentioned blogs, but on Burningman's as well) we see the problem as coming down to the question of giving support to actually existing socialism. This gets to the heart of the issue: what is revisionism and what is capitalist restoration and how are they related? The crux of the argument seems to revolve around whether revisionism in command equals capitalist restoration, and further, what role is played by the dialectical relationship between relations of production and superstructure.

I would want to look at the history of the USSR and CPSU to get at this. Of course since we're talking about antirevisionism we'll have to get into the PRC and CPC as well. While it would be simple enough to use some of the documents from the Workers Party of Belgium which have dealt with the issue very throughly, I've done that here before and the trend is to dismiss them, apparently because they aren't "Maoist" in RIM sense of the term or because they don't see Mao as having surpassed Stalin. So, instead, I'll jump off of an article put out by the Communist Party of the Philippines (a group recognized around here as firm antirevisionists) in their theoretical journal Rebolusyon, number 2, series 1992, April-June. The article is "Stand for Socialism Against Modern Revisionism," by Armando Liwanag (some say this is the nom de guerre of Jose Maria Sison). It should be noted that this document represents the line of the organization at that time is approved by the Central Committee of the CP Philippines. I have the relevant issue in pamphlet form so I'll summarize the relevant passages, give page numbers, and quote where necessary.

Here (pp. 17-36) Liwanag outlines the "process of capitalist restoration" in the USSR through three stages:

The first stage is the Krushchev regime (1953-64). Ideologically this began with the secret speech to the XXth Congress of the CPSU - the slanderous diatribe against Comrade Stalin, successor of Lenin and architect of the world's first socialist society. Liwanag notes this "inspired the anticommunist forces in Poland and Hungary to carry out uprisings" and gave the green light to other Eastern European Rightists to "adopt captialist-oriented reforms." This was more or less the coming to power of an almost identical line as that put forward by Bukarin and the Right Opposition in the late 1920s and early '30s, which was defeated in the intra-party struggle by the Stalin-led party majority. This Rightist line meant putting "NEP style" reforms (liberalization and privatization of industry and agriculture and a turn toward a preference of light industry, that is, consumer goods, over heavy industry which had long been the backbone of socialist construction) in place.

Subjectivism reigns in the "blogosphere" where everyone really values their "independence" and a lot of claims and terms are thrown around like boulders without much of an attempt to scientifically think them through or back them up. "Brezhnevism" is one of those terms. Whereas it was once applied to those parties who were considered "puppets" of Soviet "Social-Imperialism" (as the Chinese called it) under Brezhnev, it is now thrown at anyone who thinks the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev period was still socialist. It is worth noting that if that is your charge (and it isn't mine), it must be leveled here against Liwanag, who considered the Breshnev regime (1964-82) to be the second of the three stages. While Liwanag states that in this period "socialism was converted fully into state monopoly capitalism" he goes on to say that the Gorbachav regime (1985-91) "marked the third and final stage in the anti-Marxist and antisocialist revisionist counterrevolution to restore captialism and bourgeois dictatorship." Here liberalization was extended from the base to the superstructure, with the legalization of the bourgeois parties, the institution of multi-party contested elections and the eventual liquidation of the CPSU and the USSR and the overturning of the socialist revolution. This marks the completion of a counter-revolution that took over 30 years.

To quote Liwanag:

To restore capitalism, the Soviet revisionist regimes had to revise the basic principles of socialist revolution and construction and to go through stages of camoflaged counterrevolution in a period of 38 years, 1953 to 1991. It is a measure of the greatness of Lenin and Stalin that their accomplishments in 36 years of socialist revolution and construction took another long period of close to four decades to dismantle. Stalin spent 20 years in socialist construction. The revisionist renegades took a much longer period of time to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union. (ibid. p.17)

This is more or less the same line on revisionism and capitalist restoration put forward by the WPB (see, for example, the International Communist Seminar 1999 Declaration, On Certain Aspects of the Struggle Against Revisionism (.doc), and Breznjev and the National Democratic Revolution for a few samples) and by the Marxist-Leninist FRSO. Revisionism is a real danger and counter-revolution is a lengthy process.

This means we are at the point where we must clearly define socialism. I'll use as a working definition the one put forward by Lenin in his Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Theoretically, there can be no doubt that between capitalism and communism there lies a definite transition period which must combine the features and properties of both these forms of social economy. This transition period has to be a period of struggle between dying capitalism and nascent communism -- or, in other words, between capitalism which has been defeated but not destroyed and communism which has been born but is still very feeble.

Now, some (mostly Maoists, and I count myself among those who uphold Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao) argue that the instant persons come into power who take a revisionist line (who Mao and the Leftists in China called "capitalist roaders" for their desire to set the party and the state on the captialist, rather than the communist, road) capitalism is restored. In the past, we called this "Great Man Theory" and recognized it as metaphysical and unmarxist, but we'll put that aside for now (if you want a debate on Great Man Theory, please see the interventions put forth by LS in this debate on the role of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung in North Korea that took place on Burningman's Blog). Surely we all know that the masses are the makers of history.

And this theory of instant capitalist restoration seems to discount the experience of the Cultural Revolution (GPCR) more than uphold it, contrary to what the proponents of this theory would like to have us believe. It is very clear that the call in 1966 was in fact to "bombard the headquarters" and to criticize and expose those "persons in power taking the capitalist road." The GPCR was also seen as an extension of the socialist revolution given the theory of "two line struggle" - the view that there are two roads in contradiction during the socialist transition to communism - the contradiction between captialist and communist relations of production - and thus two lines at odds with one another in the party at all times during the socialist revolution. This means that the Chinese understood this in such a way that revisionism in command did not mean an end to the socialist revolution and capitalist restoration.

So, my contribution to the debate - two questions:

Is it the case that capitalist restoration means restoration and consolidation of capitalist relations of production, or does it mean the comming to power of revisionist leadership in the party? I don't think, from a materialist point of view, that one could argue that these things are equivalent.

The question that follows this one is what does that mean for us?

View Post