The Anarchists Who Thought Mao Was on Their Side |
Communism
The Anarchists Who Thought Mao Was on Their Side
As the Cultural Revolution turns 60, here's a look back at some of the fantasies that people projected onto it—and at one moment of possible prescience.
Jesse Walker | 5.16.2026 6:00 AM
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Sixty years ago today, Mao Zedong issued the May 16 Notification, a document frequently seen as the opening shot of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In this period, Mao fought his rivals in China's power structure by declaring them counterrevolutionaries and urging the country to rise up against them. Young radicals known as Red Guards heeded the dictator's call, and soon a mishmash of groups were chaotically clashing. The ensuing years saw violent rebellion, even more violent repression, and intense attacks on allegedly reactionary forms of culture. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed—probably well over a million.
At a time when Americans and Europeans had very little direct contact with China, most Westerners viewed this through a fog. Some of them projected their political ideals onto what was unfolding. This was not merely the familiar pattern where starry-eyed leftists identified with a socialist revolution: This time, some of them thought they were watching an anti-authoritarian leader instigating a revolt against bureaucracy.
Paul Berman once argued that there were three "grand tendencies" in the New Left: the old-school Marxists, the neo-Marxists, and the "inconsistent libertarians." He didn't mean the free market sort of libertarians—though as we'll see, there was some overlap. He meant people who were "anarchist at heart, allergic to bureaucracies, allergic to anything like a Marxist-Leninist centralized organization," yet "kept falling for the Third Worldist fantasies of the modern Marxists, kept wanting to celebrate Ho or some other tropical Communist as a hero of the libertarian cause." The fantasy was particularly intense around China, thanks to the Cultural Revolution (and thanks to Mao's interest in local self-sufficiency, which a distant observer could misconstrue as a more benign sort of decentralization). The idea that something semi-anarchist was happening in China had more adherents at the time than you might expect:
• David Dellinger, an antiwar activist with an anarcho-pacifist background, reported from China in 1967 that "strongly libertarian attitudes" were "noticeable in the Red Guards and (contrary to the assumptions of most Westerners) in Chinese society generally."
• The composer John Cage loved the Spooner-Tucker circle of individualist anarchists—he was constantly giving away copies of a book about them—and his politics mixed their breed of anarchy with the futurism of Buckminster Fuller. For a while he improbably added Mao to the mix, citing the dictator's interest in anarchism as a young man and his admonition to the Red Guards that "it is right to rebel."
• That counterculture bible, the Whole Earth Catalog, had a strong libertarian streak, as did its founder and primary editor, Stewart Brand. Yet one edition included a special section hailing Mao's China as "one of the great social and political........