Against Blind Faith in Learning

Mao on Professors in 1958 (22 March) talks at Chengtu (p116-7 Talks and letters):  … of entering into the spirit of it, or really understanding it’ (p117).   best bit: … ‘Naturally, we cannot go out tomorrow and beat them up … we have to make friends with them’  

✪ 11 more notes on ‘the disturbances™ in London’

The first 11 notes were here. 12. It is too easy to complain that the ‘rioting’ youth are merely obsessed with trainers and plasma TV. To say this misses the point, but it is more difficult for journalists to parse the process by which circulation, valorization, exchange, value extraction, surplus labour, alienation, and the fetishism that [...]

Mao: Its Terrible or Its Fine.

In Report from Hunan Mao praises the ‘Movement of the Riff Raff’ (Mao Vol 1 p29). The ‘riff raff’ are the ‘utterly destitute’ lumpen peasantry who we find in China as: “completely dispossessed … People who have neither land nor money, are without any means of livelihood, and are forced to leave home and become [...]

Mao on writing

In  1942 Mao Tse Tung addressed a Yenan meeting on the topic of ‘Stereotyped Party Writing’ and the role of writing within revolutionary activity. Developing an earlier essay on the Party’s style of work, he presented eight points of criticism against the boring eight part essays of ‘stereotyped party writers’ — using “poison as the [...]