I wish libs understood literally anything. The excesses of the Cultural Revolution weren't due to top-down tyranny, but from a tyranny of structurelessness.

But reality doesn't confirm to their "anything I don't like is communism, which is when state do bad thing" understanding of the world. So they ignore it.

[–] comrade_pibb@hexbear.net 6 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Can you expand on the idea of "tyranny of structurelessness"? Sounds interesting

[–] SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)

The phrase was coined in this article by Jo Freeman who was criticizing individualist Anarchist influenced trends in the feminist movement, in the 70s. It spawned a whole series of interesting debates among Marxist and Anarchist feminists at the time.

Basically, the idea is that organizations without sufficient structure to guide them, will develop informal leadership that winds up unaccountable.

So when I use that phrase to describe the Cultural Revolution, I'm saying that, because there was this Hyper-skepticism towards party structures and authority (“Bombard the headquarters", etc.) that various personalities or idealist errors could just swoop in and catch people up in these wild frenzies.

like University students getting in knife fights over the correct Marxist theory of art. Or believing that a person having bourgeois parents makes them also bourgeois by some transitive property, regardless of their actual material conditions or relations to production.

Just bizzare and unproductive shit that the cultural revolution was supposed to prevent, but ended up facilitating. Like, the underlying ideas of cultural revolution, that class struggle persists under Socialism, and that lingering Superstructural ideas can lead to negative outcomes, all make sense. But the implementation in China was a bit of a hot mess.

[–] comrade_pibb@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago

Thanks!

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