"How To Study The Cultural Revolution?"

How To Study The Cultural Revolution?

There are two possible ways in the study of the Cultural Revolution. One, which prevails today, starts from the assumption of a fully established political knowledge as the yardstick for assessing those events. In fact, being limited to the criteria of the contemporary de-politicization and the consensus, more or less fatalistic, to the rule of capitalism, this perspective studies the Cultural Revolution inevitably in the register of the denial, saying just what "has not been", or rather, what "should not have been". The other way, affirmative but largely still to build, starts from the idea of a very incomplete knowledge of what politics today could be, and studies the Chinese events of the Sixties and Seventies, which were in fact the epicenter of a long political season worldwide, as a possible resource for rebuilding an intellectual horizon of politics. The Cultural Revolution, I suggest, with its singular issues at stake, the inventive novelties, and the crucial points of impasse, was the mass political laboratory that has scrutinized the value of the entire modern revolutionary culture. It has demonstrated, well before 1989, the exhaustion of the governmental communism of the twentieth century and the strong need for a new path of egalitarian politics.

Alessandro Russo ist Professore associato confermato an der Università di Bologna.

Arbeitskreis zur Geschichte der Kulturrevolution