Maoism, Cultural Revolution and the 60s

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What did Maoism have to do with the radicalism of the 1960s?

The influence of Maoism on the global radical movements of the 1960s and 70s was enormous. But as Maoist ideas travelled beyond China, they were translated, transformed and sometimes turned against themselves, producing a hundred different “Maoisms”, and sometimes something that was no longer Maoism at all.

The reality of Maoist China — and particularly the extraordinary violence and contradictions of the Cultural Revolution — was considerably more complex than the image of Maoism that circulated internationally. For many radicals outside China, Maoism was encountered through translations of Mao’s philosophical and political writings, the Little Red Book, photographs, fragments of reporting and political mythology rather than through any sustained knowledge of events in China itself. What travelled, therefore, was not simply the Cultural Revolution, but a set of ideas that could be detached from their original context, reinterpreted and put to radically different uses.

In this Exploding Appendix session, we’ll explore how Maoist ideas about guerrilla warfare, mass mobilisation, revolutionary consciousness, peasant revolution and Third Worldism travelled from China and encountered radically different political and cultural contexts: France, Palestine, Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, Tanzania, Japan and beyond.

Rather than treating Maoism simply as an authoritarian political doctrine, we’ll also ask what made it so compelling to a generation dissatisfied with both Western capitalism and Soviet communism — and how ideas about participation, decentralisation, contradiction, consciousness and revolutionary transformation escaped Maoism itself and found echoes in feminism, anti-colonialism, art and the wider counterculture.

What happens when decentralisation becomes more than a political strategy and starts to shape how we think about culture itself? From guerrilla warfare to happenings, from revolutionary collectives to the avant-garde, from deconstruction to feminist consciousness-raising, the 1960s saw a growing, development of tools of displacement, the rejection of centralised authority and the movement of art and politics out of established institutions and into the streets. In this session, we will explore how Mao’s ideas around the guerrilla, the masses, consciousness, the peasantry and the Third World decentered classical Marxist-Leninism, and how these ideas contributed to — and sometimes became indistinguishable from — a wider radicalism of the 1960s.

This is a story of a hundred Maoisms: Maoism multiplied, mutated and, in the process, sometimes becoming something else.