Red Redder Green

Interesting revolutionary materials for the liberartion of people and nature

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During the Cultural Revolution there was a practice of cultural troops going into the communes and developing performances with dance and music for the people. The goal was to raise class consciousness and thus steel the masses against the counter-revolution. These performances were very popular but with the counter-revolution succeeding in 1976 the practice was stopped for obvious reasons.

Today there still circulate audio tape recording of some performances from the time in China. These are still popular but basically constitude forbidden material, so the masses have to be careful for the state not to find out.

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Mao Tsetung says, "Philosophy must liberate itself from the lecture halls. It must enter into each person's life."

Video: Workers of the Shanghai Generator Factory Discuss Marxist Philosophy (1976)

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From the long, episodic film How Yukong Moved the Mountains, available in its entiretly on Youtube. Arguably the greatest piece of cinema showing socialist transition which we have.

During the Cultural Revolution (CR) there were substantial efforts, true mass campaigns, to popularize and spread dialectical materialism as a means for the workers to grasp their autonomy, to fight for themselves, to combat the counter-revolutionaries, to revolutionize bourgeois and feudal society until communism is reached. The counter-revolution following Mao's death and the defeat of the "Gang of Four" reversed advances like that and replaced Marxist philosophy with a return to Confucianism, which was campaigned against during the CR as the primary oppressive ideology of Chinese history.

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Jenny Gröllmann, actress from the GDR who played Hölderlin's love in the film Hälfte des Lebens in 1985.

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French protesters against Macron's pension reform bringing out the trash.

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Swiss radicals in Zurich, May 1, 1969, wavin red flags and postes of Rosa Luxemburg and Mao.

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Stills from the very interesting, visually and emotionally striking, and thematically highly contemporary (it's centrally about the anthropocene crisis, which the Soviets had already theorized in the 1920s, as Ian Angus' book Facing the Anthropocene shos) Soviet science fiction film Per Aspera Ad Astra, also known as Through the Thorns to the Stars an Humanoid Woman.

While a lot of this film feels quite similar to something like Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, or Forbidden Planet, many other aspects are distinctly Soviet. For example there is no love story, rather the central emotional dynamic is that of a family relation where any American film would most certainly have gone for the love story. And it has a quite interesting experimental electronic sountrack to boot.

It's on youtube and a great watch. Watch the longer, uncensored version.

[foraredfuture]

Marx with the Napoleon pose. Not a guy who would have had much love for all of the academic seat farters who claim his name today without any connection to the oppressed and exploited, let alone revolution on their mind.

This is the guy who worte:

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day – but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long Katzenjammer [cat’s winge] takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its storm-and-stress period soberly. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out:

Hic Rhodus, hic salta! [Here is the rose, here dance!]

[foraredfuture]

Dazibaos (big character posters) in the early days of the Cultural Revolution, 1966.

Dazibaos were a means for the masses to bring misdeeds of their bosses or local piliticians to the public attention. Papers would often write pieces based on the dazibaos. This way they could excert pressure on those crititcized, who would then yield and get rid of the problems. In other words, dazibaos were an important means of proletarian democracy.

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No idea about the context of this. It is funny, though.

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Che Guevara looking rather cheeky.

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Mao having a puff. Probably thinking about how to fuck up the KMT or the Japanese imperialists next.

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Anti Vietnam War demonstration, Berlin, 1968

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Cultural troops during the peoples war in Nepal (1996 - 2006)

The revolution was betrayed from within, the head of the capitulationist line being Prachanda. The tragedy is that this revolution progressed extremely fast and was this close to reaching its goal. Instead of erecting a bourgeois democracy the Maoists would have erected the dictatorship of the proletariat and started New Democracy, which would have laid the basis for socialist transition. Instead they are now as before caught in semifeudal, semicolonial relations and under the boot of imperialism. It is not clear why the revolution was betrayed. However the social democrats and revisionists have been using this defeat as a supposed success strory to try to convince revolutionary parties from laying down their arms.

There are forces within Nepal trying to restart the peoples war, but this time around it will be more difficult. The speed of progression of the last revolution was also due to the complete distrust the masses had in the monarchy (in the first bourgeois election they only received about 2% of the vote). Now with bourgeois democracy in place and the revisionists and open liberals having better means to deceive the people so any revolutionary attempt is not going be as quick and comparatively easy as before.

[foraredfuture]

Chinese people studying Mao's Little Red Book during the Cultural Revolution, around 1971.

In bourgeois ideology and specifically bourgeois historiography it is usually said that the Little Red Book was nothing but a tool to brainwash the Chinese people. On the face of it this is an idealist conception, since it imagines it is sufficient to just lie to people and they will believe it, irrespective of their actual conditions. In other words, even if this were true it would imply that the Maoists were actually successful in improving the living conditions of the great majority of the Chinese people, laying the objective basis for the effectiveness of their "brainwashing".

However, the irony of the situation is that the Little Red Book was quite the opoosite of a abrainwashing tool. During the Cultural Revolution it gave the Chinese masses a means to hold party cadre accountable, as it outlines very strict ethical and political guidelines every communist has to abide by. The Chinese masses used it in precisely that way, ousting capitalists from the party and taking up the the leadership over their own affairs or bringing in actual communists who would be able to abide by the communist worldview and be in service of the people.

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Candid shot of the great Rosa Luxemburg.

Her thought and life's work is variously misrepresented and downright perverted.

Liberals reduce her to a vague sloganeerer for freedom of speech. Some of them paint her as a pacifict when she actually participated in and tried to lead the November Revolution. Other liberals follow the tradition of defaming her as "Red" (as in bloody) Rosa out for nothing but violence and destruction.

Social democrats, the very people who murdered her and who were her lifelong adversaries within the German communist movement, make her out to be on of them. They even visit her grave once a year in a deeply perverse display of ignorance, or barbarian triumphalism to put it less charitable.

Many Leninists reduce her to a less correct and ultraleft Lenin, shunning Lenin's own admiration for her. In reality both were close allies in the struggle against the social democrats and Luxemburg's criticism were coming from a comradely place. It is worth recalling that Lenin called for an immediate compilation of Luxemburg's works after he learned of her death, callin these works a treasure of the international working class.

Luxemburgists more often than not latch on to her errors and work them into a system that ends up as impotent as any other dogma. Paul Levi, the former comrade of Luxemburg and later renegade made the first step in this.

It is best to just actually engage with her thought yourself. Luxemburg was a brilliant theoretician and we can still learn from her. Read her Junius Pamphlet, the Mass Strike, Reform or Revolution, etc. Don't read her dogmatically, but take her thoughts as expressions of the class struggle to be taken up and brought to our time through concrete investigation and application, not schematism.

[foraredfuture]

Stumbled upon this. Apparently Tilda Swinton stands with Palestine. Nice.

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Fantastic illustration of George Jackson of the Black Panther Party by Kevin "Rashid" Johnson of the Revolutionary Intercommunal Black Panther Party.

Similar to Geroge Jackson, Rashid is a political prisoner of US imperialism and currently suffering from cancer.

You can support him like so: https://rashidmod.com/?p=3210