SEEKING LOGICS BEHIND 'SEEKING TRUTHS FROM FACTS': AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE AUTHORITATIVE CAPITALISM EMERGENCE FROM THE FAILURES OF THE CULTURAL REVOLU

SEEKING LOGICS BEHIND 'SEEKING TRUTHS FROM FACTS': AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE AUTHORITATIVE CAPITALISM EMERGENCE FROM THE FAILURES OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

By, Pedro Lara de Arruda.

INDEX

1 – INTRODUCTION

2 - THE FACTS FRAMING DENG'S 1978 SPEECH

3 - MAKING SENSE OUT OF AMBIGUITY

4 - WAS MAO THE LAST 'MISTAKE' OF HISTORY AND 'DENG' THE LAST WORD OF IT?

5 - THE BUILT OF AN ETHICS OF TERROR

6 – CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REPHERENCES

1 - INTRODUCTION

The following article aims at analyzing the radical shift from the Communist motivations which raised the Cultural Revolution to the capitalist seizure of the failures of Mao at the end of the Cultural Revolution in such a way as to inaugurate, with the emergence of Deng Xiaoping, a new model of capitalism which Zizek would call Authoritative Capitalism. For doing so I will depart from the 1978 speech of Deng Xiaping (1978) entitled “Emancipate the mind, seek truth from facts and unite as one in looking to the future”, which offers a sample of the main characteristics and logics of the Authoritative Capitalism it was inaugurating and, at the same moment, makes clear the process through which the failures of Mao Zedong were falsified in one such perverse logic. The analysis of the aforementioned document, however central, will not be the sole object of our analysis, which will resort to several other documents from this period and from the Cultural Revolution facts as a whole.

The comprehension over those documents, historical facts and events will resort to Badiou's notion of truth (BADIOU 2010) to develop our general comprehension of the logics between the Cultural Revolution and the emergence of Deng's Authoritative Capitalism. On the lines of Badiou's notion of truth, the 1978 text and several other historical evidences will have their intentions extracted from paradoxes and logical gaps which, as we will show, are hiding some 'unmentionable' forces behind those transformations, without which no analysis can go further than the misunderstandings that Zizek (2009; 2010) and Badiou (2009; 2010) point to be on the base of the philosophical poverty that supports a global process of depolitization of politics which sets the limits of possibility on which capitalism lies its roots. During the whole article there's a contextualization of the disagreement between Zizek (2009a) and Badiou (2010) as to what concerns the nature of Mao's mistakes and its subsequent consequences, which we will claim to be of utmost importance for the agents of what Badiou (2010) calls 'Idea of Communism' since we are currently under the dilemma of tackling the farce of 'Cultural Capitalism' (ZIZEK 2009a) with a radical and effective move towards Communism, or else, to watch the creepy face of Authoritative Capitalism behind the evanescent mask of Cultural Capitalist (ZIZEK 2009a).

2 - THE FACTS FRAMING DENG'S 1978 SPEECH

Deng's 1978 speech – “Emancipate the mind, seek truth from facts and unite as one in looking to the future” – is considered to be of seminal relevance to understand China's politics still today. In fact, authors like Slavoj Zizek (2009a), Badiou (2010), Paul Ashton, A. J. Bartett and Justin Clemens (2006), Alain Baudiou (2010), A. J. Barlett and Justin Clements (2006), among others, points that the relevance of understanding the changes operated into China since the emergence of Deng Xiaoping as the Chairman would be important to understand a global trend that they identify with some sort of shift from the so called “democratic capitalism” (or a violent capitalist under the coverage of democratic institutions) towards a clear dictatorial capitalism. The article of Deng (1978) in itself is full of contradictions, methodological weakness and non-mentioned aspects which, however, should not be read as inabilities of Chairman Deng Xiaoping but instead, and according to the interpretation of the referred authors (ZIZEK 2009a; 2009b BADIOU 2010; ASHTON, BARLETT, CLEMENS 2006), as well intended strategies to use the power of the party and the still alive rhetorical strength inherited of the Maoist revolution to foster an environment of post-politics in which 'the politics is transformed into police' (ZIZEK 2009a): There's the creation of an environmental perception of impossibility that lead people to accept oligopolistic rights of taking part in politics and the subsequent exclusion of some elements from the mere condition of political subjects – the Homo Sacer of Giorgio Aganbem (1998, 2005), which was originated from his previous development of Walter Benjamin's (1921) early concept of 'Bare Life'.

Before understanding the links between Deng's 1978 speech and the further changes which launched China as the early symptom of a new global capitalism, it's important to contextualize the very political moment in which it was addressed. The relevance of one such task relies, first, in the importance of not dismissing the weak theoretical base of the speech by a reading restricted to its own. The very fact that this speech was addressed in a high board meeting of the Chinese Communist Party at the same year Deng managed to become the Chairman of China makes clear the case that the message of this speech is directly addressed and dependent of the political moment it was part of. Therefore, it must be kept in mind that those words were pronounced as the closing speech in the Third Plenum of the Eleventh National Party Congress Central Committee in December 1978. This Third Plenum, which lasted over a month, is considered to be the biggest turning point in the Chinese history since the Maoist unification of China under the flag of the Communist Party, and those two events are possibly sharing a leading position among all the other events in the Chinese modern and contemporary history.

Among the most relevant issues discussed during this month of Plenum were: The abandonment of mistakes committed in the past and their correction in the present; the abandonment of the issue of class struggle as the main goal and its substitution by the issue of promoting the 'Four Modernizations'; and the substitutions of economics instead of politics on the command of the government actions (XIAOPING 1978). Not coincidently, the closing speech of Deng addressed all those polemic issues somehow imposing a veredict on the claims that was by and large biased in favor of his own positions early exposed. The issue of reviewing the history of the Party and identifying mistakes, for instance, gained a large role in his closing ceremony speech (seeking truth from facts), and ended up addressing most mistakes to the factions that he described as 'leftists', therefore unfolding the way for his non-admited 'rightist' administration and even managing to invert the veredict regarding the 'rightist' involvement on the Tiananmen Square incident (1976) and the reasons behind the removal of Peng Dehuai in 1959.

More than simply noting that Deng imposed such veredicts and policy lines for he had strength enough in the Party to do so – which is clear in light of the allotment of key allies in the Political Bureau during the month of Plenum (e.g. Chen Yun as additional Vice Chairman and Hu Yaobang as member of the P.B., Secretary General of the CCP and head of the Party's Propaganda Department), it's important to note that he refrained from a more radical review of history for he would further make large use of the Maoist charismatic heritage to use the Chinese people and popular cultural aspects to solidify his new patterns of impossibility and subsequent new categories of marginalized and non-existing political subjects. According to one such interpretation, which we will further develop, the preservation of Mao's personal identity was not only a reflex of Deng's fear of facing a popular unrest in case he directly confronted the charismatic ghost of Mao Tse Tung but, most of all, the clear perception that the power of Mao among people could be distorted into his own interests.

3 - MAKING SENSE OUT OF AMBIGUITY

However our interpretation may sounds, the fact is that it can be positively defended in light of Rancière's Arche Politics, which claims that political restriction is also an outcome of certain types of communitarian shared beliefs and value systems. Therefore the elitist capitalism Deng was in the way to built would be more solidly built if backed by the processes denounced by Rancièr. In a negative sense, this same interpretation can prove reasonable in light of the fact that in cases where Mao's charismatic legacy were not necessary – not usable in the built of an Arche Politics – he was simply dismissed, as was the case regarding: Deng's (1978) opposition to the “two whatevers” of Hua Guofeng (1977) – “support whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made and follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave”; and Deng's (1978) severe critiques of the Great Leap forward (even though such critiques were always presented with the pedagogic argument that the mistakes taken by Mao couldn't lead to a serious judgment and re-evaluation of his historic role for his achievements were of utmost importance to China as a whole).

For the vital role of changing history without dismissing the charismatic influence of the heritage of Mao, Deng (1978) used the whole first part of his speech, entitled “emancipating the mind is a vital political task”, to overwhelm only the Gang of Four with all the grave mistakes committed during the Cultural Revolution. Also, and in order to avoid directly confronting the population with the guilt of the political lines they supported during the Cultural Revolution, Deng (1978) was cautious enough to deposit the guilt in the Gang of Four or else in a 'historical specific structure' that accounted for four main forces: First, the Gang of Four ideological taboos and forbidden zones; second, over-concentration of power in a non-democratic centralism of the Party; third, the absence of a clear differentiation between right and wrong; fourth, the parochial aspect of the Chinese society, still quilted in the small producers habits and values.

Despite the validity of the arguments which points to the links between the Maoist organization of China as an alienating structure (to the extent that those organizations prevailed over genuine popular initiatives as was the case in the Shanghai Commune and others) (ZIZEK 2009a), the development of Deng's (1978) speech and the concrete actions which followed his leadership of China didn't really checked the issues he criticized, but simply changed the members and ideologies carried out through this same logics. Both, on his 2007 presentation to Mao's “On practice and contradiction” and on his 2009 book, entitled “First as Tragedy, then as Farce”, Slavoj Zizek mentioned how Maoism (unintentional) settled the grounds for the further development of an authoritarian capitalism in China by establishing the very policy of taboos and centralized decision-making processes which latter served to the market oriented approach of Deng Xiaoping to overcome the class struggle heritage and develop the bases of contemporary China. In that sense, its not unreasonable to think that Deng's strategy concerned the 'change of history' as a way to preserve the mechanisms created by Mao at the service of his own distinct ideology.

The speech we analyze here (that of 1978) is full of evidences of one such appropriation of the Maoist authoritarian political system by the market oriented ideology of Deng Xiaoping. A clear example is the festive celebration of the reverse of the Tiananmen Square Incident (that of 1976, and not the most famous one, of 1989, most known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre) as the overcome of pure justice over politics, without noticing that this new judgment may have been just an adaptation to the new forces in handle of China. In one such case the so much mentioned 'self-critique' of Deng Xiaoping didn't observe the natural imperative of debating possible links between the coincidence between the juridical revision and the political transformation in place, preferring to simply not discuss one such theme and neglect it to the same taboo zones he accused the Gang of Four to make use of.

It's also controversial that his startlingly claim for decentralization and democratization rapidly evolved to a claim for unity and stability, as pointed in the third part of his speech, called “solving old problems with help people look to the future”:

Stability and unity are of prime importance. To strengthen the unity of people of whatever nationality, we must first strengthen unity throughout the Party, and especially within the central leadership. (XIAOPING 1978 – extracted from digital version of the original document)

Still in this section of his speech, where he starts moving from the pure rhetorical romanticism and passes to a more technical information of the new Party lines, there's a clear controversy as he stresses the importance of acknowledging and correcting errors from the past but clearly skips the duty of fully judging Mao Tse Tung. As already mentioned, the careful manipulation of Mao's image would prove to be more useful than his trial, therefore it was preferable to Deng to contradict himself twice than to abide this tool of popular assessment that was the heritage of Mao's charisma. On doing that, however, the double intern-contradictions committed were: First, the absence of judging per se, since he considered that judgments of the past as a whole were a duty of his times; second, the absence of judging this particular feature – Mao – whose ideas were so opposed to the ones Deng was about to implement (after all, Mao failed on the pursuance of the Communist Idea, as Zizek and Badiou agree on saying, while Deng Xiaoping never really engaged on this Idea, but only used the 'adjectivated' Communist image/aesthetic to impose his authoritarian model of capitalism).

4 - WAS MAO THE LAST 'MISTAKE' OF HISTORY AND 'DENG' THE LAST WORD OF IT?

The way Deng (1978) poses this eminently political judicial revision as a mere technical achievement itself announces the content of the ideology he would make use of the Maoist authoritarian mechanisms to disseminate. If, as we have shown, the manipulation of history and careful handling of the image of Mao in this speech served the purpose of maintaining the very centralized authoritative institutions he criticizes so much, the technical approach with which he tries to vest the Tienanmen incident is already revealing of the ideology of consciously substituting the political debate by technical decisions. Reflecting on this issue Zizek (2009a) points that here the effort is to deny political space for discussions concerning different desires of action and, instead, to limit politics to the choice between measures which 'work' and those which 'doesn't work', some sort of preclude to Fukuyama's (tale/plan) “The end of history and the last man”. The failure in Fukuyama's precocious 'End of History' (or should we say, attempt of 'murdering the history'), however, is the fact that the mere evaluation of what can or can not 'work' is in itself the outcome of an untold and silent struggle for settling standards of impossibility – Badiou's (2010) concept of transcendental reality, which, curiously, accounts for one of the most classical definitions of 'Politics as the art of the impossible'. Here Zizek (2009a) makes clear how this traditional definition of politics – the art of the impossible – is not referring to the hysterical characteristics that the capitalist speech usually attaches to the so called 'utopians', but, instead, it is directly addressed to the effort of delimiting criteria of impossibility without even being noticed. The art of politics then would be its invisibility, not properly the art of making choices, but the utmost effort to delimiting patterns of choice itself.

Initially agreeing with Zizek (2009a), Alain Badiou (2010) also highlights the utmost effort of each and every emancipatory struggle to be that of creating new conceptions of possibility. Important to notice, however, is that, even though the concept of politics to Zizek will refer to something much more connected to philosophy and ideology than the concept of politics to Badiou, the epistemological preeminence of philosophy on Badiou's reading will be more accentuated than in Zizek. In a sense, Zizek presents a deeper link between his concept of politics and philosophy and ideology to the extent that those cathegories are hardly separable, while Badiou makes a clear difference which, if reveals a bigger difference between politics and philosophy, does so in a way that stresses the epistemological preeminence of philosophy over politics. Both them recognize the relational aspect between those concepts – philosophy, politics and ideology – but Zizek focus on the organic and unseparable link between the empirical expression of such concepts, while Badiou separates them and claims philosophy to have a seminal importance to the ever existence of the others.

If one such difference can be said too tiny in light of the fact that, in any case, both authors recognize the mandatory need of philosophy on the promotion of the Benjaminian (1921; 1942) and Rancièrian (1999; 2005; 2007) task – that of criticizing the established order in benefit of those excluded by it, the 'Oppressed' (BENJAMIN 1942) or the 'Parts of no Part' (RANCIÈRE 1999; 2005; 2007)– its effects can lead to pronounced disagreements when it comes to Badiou's (2010) more positive position toward experiences in which the mismatch between the sensitive and the inteligible worlds (to use the Platonian categories) reached the extremes of the Cultural Revolution (in which the rich philosophical heritage can be contrasted to the catastrophical paths it opened to the authoritative capitalism that succeeded as the aftermath of its hangover).

Taking the risk of being repetitive, we address the practical effects of this theoretical disagreement once again due to the different judgments it authorizes on the case of the Cultural Revolution and it's role in the trajectory of Chinese politics (seized by Deng's Authoritative Capitalism) and global capitalism as a whole.

A consequence of Badiou's 'Idea' in relation to 'transcendental realities' and Zizek's 'politization of politics' is that the former dives somehow deeper in an analysis that Plato would track to the field of sensitive knowledge, and this slight difference between both authors can be said to cause their disagreement on the intensity of the judgment each of them make of Mao Zedong. Badiou (2010) is more condescended with Mao's mistakes for acknowledging the role of mistakes in the 'process of truth' - Idea. Zizek (2009a), by his time, is more strict regarding those mistakes, not for denying the role of mistakes in the creation of new limits of impossibility, but for evaluating that Mao's restrictive subjectivation of the Revolution (through the fetishist 'cult of the leader' and the overcoming of other subjective forms of dealing with the universal problems of capitalism by the State-party axiom) was a self-councious shortcut which prevented the real problems of emerging in his version of Badiou's 'Idea' (according to which the hypothesis of a reality must serve to expand the the limits of possibility by shaking settled orders by means of new and innovative questions, accompanied with solutions or not). Therefore, Zizek criticizes Mao for 'privatizing' the forces at play in a way that made them too vulnerable to the capitalist comodification process (a deeper understanding on this debate will come at the end of this article).

Whether the Maoist subjectivation was self-conscious or not of its alienation from the Benjaminian/Ranciérian universal task of Communism, or whether it prevented necessary philosophical questions/problems from emerging (in case it was not itself, as Badiou claims, the very philosophical question/problem necessary at that stage of the Idea of Communism – pursuance of the Thesis of Communism), the fact is that the post-Cultural Revolution scenario was one of no incentive to popular bottom-up subjectivations of the universal task of Communism. Therefore, when Deng and his counter-revolutionary fellows seized the power in 1976 (formally in 1978), the State-party apparatus had the (paradoxical!) formal monopoly of the Communist task and, in the absence of popular agency in the pursuance of such task, the seizure of the State-party control enabled them to substitute – to empty – the very Hypothesis of Communism (which is the aforementioned Benjaminian/Ranciérian task) and use it only as a rhetorical tool to establish an authoritarian transcedental reality of capitalism.

According to this view its interesting to get back to Deng's 1978 speech and extend the analysis of the technical approach with which Deng tried to vest the judgment of the Tiananmen issue to his broader political lines defended in this speech of 1978, so that one could clearly recognize that the tendency of transforming policy into technical decision played exactly the role of emptying the Communist Hypothesis into a mere rhetorical instrument for depolitization of politics. Besides the extensive depolitization judgment of the Tiananmen incident, this tendency is directed mentioned in the 1978 speech when the goal of supressing class struggle was substituted by the goal of promoting development of the 'four modernizatios', as well as when the Party officially changed the preeminence of politics for the 'preeminence of economics', claiming a bigger role to technocrats and technicians as if ideology could step out of the Chinese reality. By doing that Deng was clearly working out what Zizek (2009a) would further call the 'ideology of post-politics'.

It's not a coincidence that Zizek (2009a) identified current China (post-Cultural Revolution China) as one of the firsts and the most intense representative of what some authors call 'radical centralism' or 'radical moderated', in a sense that they radicalize the political settlement of referential of impossibility to one such extent that no political choice is really possibly, leaving only the possibility of pursuing their – leading elites – non-spoken ideologies through the so called technical decisions. Along with China, Zizek (2009a) also identifies the Bill Clinton's police and the British New Labour among the expressions of this trend that he claims to be growing in the global capitalism.

In his attempt to understand the specific process through which this background manipulation imposes ideological limited choices, Zizek (2009a) refers to three logics of political conflicts suggested by Rancière (1999; 2005; 2007) and suggests one extra of his own. It is very important that we briefly define those four processes here as to highlight the reasons why the already mentioned handling and manipulation of Mao's image was preferable to Deng than the simple dismissal, and also to understand the other process which made wide use of the depolitization strategy on establishing the Authoritative Capitalism in China.

The first of those mechanisms is the already mentioned Arche-Politics (RANCIÈRE 1999; 2005; 2007) which relies in organically structured social homogeneities as a way to avoid dissidence and deny political space. Zizek (2009a) defines one such example referring to the Japanese outcasts – the Burakumins – which are basically excluded from having a political role because society as a whole shares some values that isolate them from constituting social relations to the minimum extend needed to make themselves politically voiced. A situation just similar to the traditional exclusion of Dalits, Advasis, OBC's and tribal communities in India. In the particular case of China the preservation of Maoist rhetoric appeal, as well as the State-party reaffirmation of it's Marxist and Leninist 'commitments' despite the complete distortion of their ideas, served as a tool through which Deng and the reformulated Party could foster people to endorse the limits of impossibility which the leading cadres decide to be appropriate.

The greater difference between Mao's use of such mechanism and that carried on by Deng Xiaoping and his followers was concerning the shift, from a socialist ideological choice for combating class domination, towards the market oriented goal of modernization. In both cases, however, the social notion of counter-revolutionary was fostered with the purpose of adding legitimacy to the discriminatory restriction regarding those who have the right to participate in the politics and those who are organically excluded from it – the Chinese Homo Sacers were 'striped out' of their universal rights under the simple claim of being counter-revolutionaries, regardless of a large philosophical emptiness behind such classification (to the extent that the same logic which Mao used to curb the Commune's after 1969 – the retreat of the Cultural Revolution – can be noticed on the overall authoritative measures practiced by Deng).

The second mechanism of post-politization which was largely used in China was the 'Marxist Meta-Politics' (RANCIÈRE 2007), or Utopian Socialist Meta-Politics (ZIZEK 2009a), according to which the political choice is transfered to another times and realities, in a situation according to which the choice is always portrayed as an award to be reached in the future if one succeeds on the technical imperatives of the present. The traditional messianic view of a better society for which present sacrifices are to be done – including the sacrifice of the right of choice itself, presents this desired future as a technical success under the given limits of impossibility ante. In general terms one can account for the tautological impossibility of one ever regaining the right of choice since the messianic view on the Marxist prescription of a 'liberated society' accounts for some sort of automatic harmony and perfect functioning of the society so that dissents and choices wouldn't be there as well. In short, during such kind of revolutionary process choice is not there because the struggle for freedom demands technical obedience, and after achieving freedom the choice presumably will not be there either, because the very notion of utopian freedom in such cases is built upon impossibility limits that does not recognize that one can not be satisfied in such scenario.

In the more specific case of Deng's China, the 1978 speech and its multiple references to the messianic aspects of Mao, Marx and Lenin – which in several cases are the outcome of misreadings and other sort of manipulations of their ideas – is basically an attempt to keep this spirit of ever present sacrifice for the messianic promise of Communism alive so that the concrete interests behind the new lines of the Communist Party could be better served, even when those present sacrifices involve sinking deeper and deeper into the market traps.

Before moving into the other two mechanisms of post-politicization and its effects on Deng's China it's important to stress that is precisely the capability to develop a typically market oriented policy with the easiness of those traditional socialist instruments of depolitization that made the Chinese capitalist experience to be unique and, as already mentioned, to be very likely a 'symptom' of a new sort of capitalism in the era of Globalization. In his book, “First as a tragedy, then as a farce”, Zizek (2009a) points out that, differently from China, which entered directly this Dictatorial-Capitalism, the global trend was to alienate some Communist values, like those in the core of the May 1968 movements, into what he called 'Cultural Capitalism' – a project which latter on proved to be failed in a typical Hegelian (MARX 1937; 1975) / Benjaminian (1921; 1942) dual historical appearance; first as a tragedy (of the Twin Towers 11/09/2001 disturbance of the 'End of History') and then as a farce (currently revealed by the Financial/Economic Crisis).

Deng realized very early the possibility of 'comoditizing' non-material values (possibly for this reason China jumped directly from the Communist pursue to the Dictatorial-Capitalism without passing through the Cultural Capitalist stage) and precisely for that his speech is so decorated with Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ritualistic reverences, which, however, has little or nothing at all to do with the ideas they defended, but were very important to keep alive those previously mentioned socialist modalities of alienation that Deng was willing to take advantage of.

Among the many contradictions evident on Deng's policy in the terms of the 1978 document we are taking as reference here, the Zizekian view drive us to highlight one particular internal contradiction which otherwise could pass unrevealed – that between Deng's startlingly claim against the worship of some books and texts (clearly referring to the books and texts of Mao and his supporters) despite the fact that Deng himself only makes ritualistic usages of those authors. Deng only refers to those 'icons' as a way to keep alive the Messianic devotion and the social support as means of delimiting impossibilities. After all, Deng didn't launch an attack on the worship of books and authors (which in a more Marxist jargon could be described as the fetishization of the merchand or commodification), but simply used the iconic role of those texts and features to direct the worships towards the capitalist (non)ideas (lack or impossibility of Ideas as Baudiou says) that he defended instead of the original Communist Hypothesis, which, however imperfect and distorted, was behind what Badiou called Mao's Communist event – specially in the case of the call for the Cultural Revolution and it's early days. The concept of event is presented bellow as defined by Badiou in the concluding chapter of his book “The Idea of Communism” (BADIOU 2010):

I call an 'event' a rupture in the normal order of bodies and languages as it exists for any particular situation (if you refer to Being and Event [1988] or Manifesto for Philosophy [1989] or as it appears in any particular world (if you refer instead to Logics of Worlds [2006] or the Second Manifesto for Philosophy [2009])). What is important to note here is that an event is not the realization of a possibility that resides within the situation or that is dependent on the transcendental laws of the world [this would be simply a 'Historical fact']. An event is the creation of new possibilities. It is located not merely at the level of objective possibilities but at the level of the possibility of possibilities. Another way of putting this is: with respect to a situation or a world, an event paves the way for the possibility of what – from the limited perspective of the make-up of this situation or the legality of this world – is strictly impossible. If we keep in mind here that, for Lacan, the real = the impossible, the intrinsically real aspects of the event will be readily seen. We might also say that an event is the occurrence of the real as its own future possibility. (BAUDIOU, 2010, p. 242-243).

Getting back to Deng's 1978 document and its strategies to depoliticize the socialist institutions inherited from Mao, one must point to a third mechanism of depolitization, traditionally present in the liberal democracies – the Rancière's (2007) concept of Para-Politics. Accordingly, the political existence is only extended during the electoral process, afterwards it becomes restricted to the elected subjects.

If this mechanism is already dangerous in the typical liberal-democracies, in which the historical possession of the state foster elites-owned politics and pure class dominations, it gets even worst when acting together with some socialist alienation mechanisms that reduce even more the limits of possibility (shrinking the limits of impossibility) by making use of acute mechanisms of socio-cultural peoples control.

The last of those depolitization mechanisms, which is an original contribution of Zizek (2009a), not previously describled by Rancière, is the Ultra-Politics one, according to which the conflict is depoliticized through its militarization and the dismissal of several conflicts by simply folding all them in a single 'Us vs Them' logic. Of special relevance to the Chinese case is the fact that this mechanism, traditionally associated to the capitalist strategies of delimiting limits of impossibility, usually through nationalism and other private-identity bases, was largely benefited by the early usage of it against Japanese and US Imperialism even in a moment when the Chinese Revolution was eminently committed to the class struggle, therefore creating a complex historical track on which the concrete necessity for a supra-class anti-imperialism resistance is easily confused with the instrumental claim of Imperialist-resistance as to simply fold up other identity struggles inside China and, even worst, to fold up the universal identity of Rancière's part-of-no-part (1999; 2005; 2007), Benjamin's opressed (1921; 1942) and Baudiou's 'counting-for-nothing' (2010) , into egocentric-private subjectivations alienated and commodified.

The analyzed text (XIAOPING 1978) is illustrative of each and everyone of those four mechanism, as well as of the concrete object behind the untold ideology that Deng announced to carry on. Despite the purpose of depoliticizing the society according to capitalist market-oriented standards of impossibility is not clearly announced in the text (as it never is), it demands no more than a quick read of this 1978 speech to see that the only aspects of the Maoist event that Deng was really keen to preserve were the two first depolitization mechanisms mentioned here – the socialist mechanisms which emerged as Mao's failure to overcome the party-state (particularly in the critical moment of the Cultural Revolution). It's also simple to note that the second two of those mechanisms emerge as indirect consequences of the capitalist re-emergence Deng was bringing to China.

In light of the exposed above, it's not difficult to identify that the real proposal behind his contradictions, ritualistic references to Mao, Marx and Lenim, as well as his 'untold words', was basically what Zizek (2009a) called an Authoritarian Capitalism updated to the globalization era, or a market-oriented policy made easier through the socialist authoritarian mechanisms of political exclusion. The several declarations of commitment to communism and the ideas of Mao, Lenim and Marx don't find any concrete support on the economic and technocrat guidelines he used to mark the new limits of impossibility since 1978, therefore they should be understood only as long as they play a decisive role on maintaining the governability of a system which sacrifice social and ethic values for the loud voices of capitalist modernization and fetishist unequal accumulation of wealth.

Regarding the untold social sacrifices inherent to Deng's approach, one can easily point to clear examples coming from the Chinese reality and the Communist Party in that country, such as: The elitist and unaccountable rule of the Communist Party; the lack of social welfare; the lack of freedom of expression (ZIZEK 2009a; 2009b). In sum, the legalization and normalization of fascist practices toward marginalized and unpoliticized members of a society (which is precisely what Walter Benjamin (1921) and Giorgio Agamben (1998; 2005) called 'Bare Life').

5 - THE BUILT OF AN ETHICS OF TERROR

As to the ethical sacrifice made by Deng, Paul Ashton's book on Alan Baudiou biopolitics applied to some practical situations - “The Praxis of Alain Badiou” (ASHTON, BARTLETT, CLEMENS 2006) - shows how the egocentric and alienating subjectivation policies of Mao undertaken at the final moments of the Cultural Revolution (or the moments which settled its end?) oriented the Chinese national ethics according to the traditional Lacan-Badiou (Sophocles' -Aeschiles) crossing dualities which orient the perception of the ethics by the subject. Matching the Lacanian (1992) emphasis on the relation between superego and anxiety (represented by the performances of Creon on the Sophoclean tragedies – Oedipus King and Antigone) with Badiou's (2009b) understanding of the pair courage-justice of Aeschelyan tragedy – Oresteia, we than assume four individual aspects in the matrix of the subjective ethics, which are: Anxiety (angoisse), the intervention of the superego, the courage and the justice (BADIOU 2009b). According to one such interpretation, what happened is that the emergence of Deng inherited a very subjectivised State's ethics which enabled him – as the new self of the subjectivised State – to directly interfere in the equilibrium of those images of ethics (elements in the psychoanalytical process shaping the ethics). Therefore Deng privileged those elements benefiting the resilience and depoliticization, thus creating a rather stable and acritique pattern of ethics which he managed to communicate to the society through the open link which was the heritage of Mao's charismatic figure legitimizing the Party and echoing it's decisions.

According to the Lacan-Badiou crossed model mentioned above, the anxiety could be described as a 'hysterical' tendency emerging from the perception of law as a question without an answer, the superego process would be the counter-balancing trend of the anxiety which would overload the gaps perceived by the subject with more and more laws in such a way that Badiou (2009b) and Hegel (1999) would agree on calling it the representation of Terror. Courage then emerge as an antidote to the Terror, and is best portrayed as being 'an answer without a question', while justice emerge as the most imprecise of those forces trying to establish a relationship with law in absolute opposition to the Terror, therefore claiming for the relativization of the laws in benefit of reality – what launches the whole process in a Hegelian (1995; 1999) infinite repetition since Lacan (1992) understand that reality equals absolute impossibility.

Worth of mention here is the way technocracy and depolitization processes lead by Deng Xiaoping basically excluded the space for anxiety, courage and justice in the social structures of the subjectivized state inherited of Mao since the cultural industry rooted in Deng's Party lines were mainly based on overwhelming loads of laws and technical orientations, instead of questions fostering multiple participations. It wouldn't be exaggerated to infer from those cross-models of ethics analysis that the expansion of 'Bare Life' went to the extreme of dominating not only the politically-restricted subjects of China society but even the politically unwelcome selfs of the Chinese individuals. Therefore, the images of justice, courage and anxiety could be understood as the Homo Sacers of the Lacanian Subject under Deng's cultural superstructure (would it be the case of forging the term Self Sacers?).

One such interpretation can be indirectly noted in Zizek's (2009a) “First as a tragedy, then as a Farce” in which he mentions the overall processes through which Deng managed to preserve the remaining of Mao's tragedy – his failed revolution – to use as a base for the post-political capitalism he was about to implement in China – the Farse of Chinese post-1976 communist claims. In the recent review Zizek (2010) wrote for the London Review of Books on Richard McGregor’s book - “The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers” (2010) - he aimed precisely at the biopolitical appropriation of Mao's structures such as those referred by Paul Ashton's Lacanian interpretation of Baudiou in the Chinese case (ASHTON, BARTLETT, CLEMENS 2006).

Acknowledging the overcome of superego Terror over the other images of subjective ethics, and agreeing with Badiou (2009b) on what concerns the individual subjective root of the Terror, Zizek (2010) pointed that, despite all the already mentioned mechanisms to set the basis of the post-political capitalism, it's also extremely important that the ruling cadres themselves stick to some 'objective illusion', “the figure of the ‘big Other’ as a background with which they could exert their ruthlessness and drive for power” (ZIZEK 2010, retrieved from online version). The building of the post-capitalist 'ethics' and its subsequent political structures of impossibility are largely dependent on the availability of an unbalanced superego through which the leading cadres themselves could overcome the principles of the rhetoric ethics of the official propaganda without being able to fully recognize their agency on that – the technical (lack of) aura of their decisions makes easy to scape from individual responsibilities not by ignorance or lack of intention, but by the passive role they assume towards their implicit choice of what is possible or impossible, avoidable or unavoidable, chosen or imposed. In that same review of 2010 Zizek quotes the many heart-attacks, sudden deaths and suicides of Communist Party delegates of URSS after Krushev denounced Stalin's crimes in 1956. According to him, and in line with our analysis, those reactions were not an outcome of the revealing of unknown facts, but simply the reaction of those delegates due to the displacement of their belief in the otherness behind their own actions.

This very logic can be accounted to understand the reasons why the real message behind Deng's 1978 speech are, as we claim, not to be found on the pretty slogans distributed all over it, but, instead, on the deep meaning of every incoherence and in the many meanings of each unspoken sentence that, in fact, were the requiem of a struggle for Communism in China and the silent sleep of a baby new-capitalism conceived by the worst of the modern capitalism and the the worst of the Maoism. In the best Lacanian tradition, if we assume that reality is an indescribable dynamic and that signs are tombs of this reality which we killed to create language (cognitive structures), than Deng's speech of pragmatism and “truth from facts” is a graveyard of Communist signs kept well dead and under the land to assure a dissent-free environment for the mushrooming of a macrophage Capitalism.

6 - CONCLUSION

The exposed understanding of the capitulation of the struggle for Communism in China after Deng Xiaping took the rule of the country is out of controversy among the few intellectuals of our time who refuse to take part in the creepy ceremony of burying a history which is still alive (some weird kind of sati of an Immortal HERstory?). Among the individuals who refuse to accept that capitalist-pragmatism is all that one can aim, there's a fair consensus regarding the clear capitalist cooptation of what one day served to the event of a Maoism committed to the Communist Hypothesis. As pointed in the beginning of our analysis, however, there's a paradigmatic disagreement between the different judgements made of Mao even among analysts who are innocent of 'attempting to murder the history'. And as also pointed before, one such disagreement leads to important consequences on the overall comprehension of the the dynamical process of 'creating possibilities' – Badiou's (2010) concept of Idea.

In light of the contemporary crying need of creating new possibilities instead of those offered by the Fukuyamian post-political fiasco – noted as a tragedy in the event of the September 11th Terrorist Attempts and as a farce in the current Economic Crisis (ZIZEK 2009a) – the use made of the failures of the Cultural Revolution by Deng demand all the agents of the Idea of Communism to devote maximum attention to understanding the nature of mistakes that should be axiomatically avoided in further events to take place. For that reason the debate between Badiou (2010) and Zizek (2009a) emerges as a necessary one not only in light of the Chinese history and of the comprehension of the past in general but, most of all, in light of the current necessity to oppose the expected hangover of the Economic Crisis with new parameters of possibility which are necessary to impede the reinvention of Capitalism from it's Cultural fashion into the even more perverse Authoritative model launched by Deng. The same way Badiou (2010) and Zizek (2009a) use the contemporary dilemma of advancing the Idea of Communism on the occasion of the Economic Crisis to invert the question of “what can Communism make for one?” into that of “what can one make for Communism” (since that's the only Idea still existence at our times and, therefore, renounce it may means renouncing the space of Ideas on our time as a whole), we should possibly address the inflection point between the Cultural Revolution and Deng's capitalist success not so much from the perspective of providing explanations for it, but also, by searching there some explanations to the dilemma we are put in now.

Therefore, I conclude this article stressing the necessity to explore the debate launched by Zizek (2009a) and Badiou (2010) and, while acknowledging that most of the arguments presented by Badiou are extremely valuable and convincingly – especially those concerning the risks of distant historical analysis – it must be pointed out that my personal interpretation lies somewhere closer to the Zizekian position.

My comprehension over the facts share the Zizekian impression according to which Mao's mistakes at the Cultural Revolution occurred due to the use of 'capitalist shortcomings' at a moment in which the movement was to experience the very practical handling of the dialectical gaps that were invoked as the main goal of the Cultural Revolution itself. Accordingly, the greatest mistake of Mao was basically the lending of private subjectivations typical of capitalism instead of really accepting the challenge of looking into the practice for the answer which couldn't emerge from a pure theoretical dialectical exercise.

Even worst, and strengthening the Zizekian position, the shortcomings practiced by Mao seems to me to have been self-couscious, and, in light of the statements of Chairman Mao during the early days of the Cultural Revolution, the actions he end up undertaking at the end of this process were not only mistaken for not settling the problems that emerged from an unexpected new reality, but, instead, they were mistaken in relation to the core arguments of the actions proposed by Mao at the eve of launching the Cultural Revolution.

My background for such interpretation departs from the alienation of the Communist Hypothesis itself from the Communist Party between 1959 and 1965, which pushed Mao to acknowledge the necessity of escaping the party-State 'trap' – what can be noted on the early idea of Commune that was behind the early days of the Cultural Revolution. At that time many of Mao's speech referred to the Commune of Paris, for instance. However, when the expected new problems concerning this new realities started to emerge Mao stepped back on (re)universalizing the party-state and subjectivating the revolution according to his own private identities of ethics and justice – of which the seizure of the Shanghai Commune and the general dismantling of communes into committees was representative.

On undertaking this reverse move Mao took advantage of his heroic image among the people and alienated the sense of proletariat (the solidarity link between those who self-recognized themselves as equally being part-of-no-part or 'counting-for-nothing'') into a sense of loyalty to the Chairman or blind faith in the old transcendental world. And here it must be pointed out my personal disagreement with Badiou's (2010) attempt to justify the iconoclastic revolutionary figure due to the necessity of inscribing the Idea of Communism into forms of representation which could reach the masses, as if there were no other means of assessing the masses without compromise the very fact that the communist universality is not a fixed axiom or an image made out of adjectives or representations, but, as Badiou (2010) himself acknowledges, a dynamic process in which the agents must realize their own whole as both, structures, agents and, therefore, sites of transformation.

Despite the fact that icons push 'worshipers' away from this psychoanalitical understanding by the automatic passive role people are expected to pay in order to reify the particular 'objects of worship', it's even more complicate to accept the defense of one such tool – the Communist icons – on the argument that they are the only possible instruments of inscription of the Communist Idea. After all, the very concept of Idea opposes the insurmountable notion of possibilities themselves.

It's of my understanding that Zizek (2009a) criticizes Mao not so much for the failures which emerged from the event in which he took a leadership role, but, instead, because Mao denied the practical answers and problems the right to emerge by consciously misruling a smokescreen chaos that allowed him to champion his personal private subjectivity over (and not into) the genuine proletarian universalities. In his chapter named “Mao Zedong, the Marxist Lord of Misrule”, Zizek (2009b) clearly condemns the fact that the failures and mistakes coming from the Maoist event derived from Mao's private subjectivation of the process instead of being mistakes coming from more universalized categories. It's not about being wrong, is about being wrong in private. Privatization of the mistakes, as well as of the hits, is capitalist prone not only for splitting the universal condition under separate wraps to be commodified, but, also and foremost, for silencing voices which, right or wrong, would step out the Bare Life by simply having the right of expressing themselves and, on doing so, would constitute a new limit of possibility just for inaugurating new worlds in which such inexistent voices would come to exist, regardless of eventual mistakes of the way they choose to inscribe such existence into the 'fantasies of history and language'.

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