Liberalism remains. Nothing, no matter how canny, or brutal, or ideologically rigorous, has been enough to combat it. When Mao wrote Combat Liberalism, the most terrifying and total assault on the road to Capitalism was ahead, as was its nightmarish collapse. Whatever has become of China today, the target, and its more and less unwitting aide Liberalism, have grown and distorted in the meantime.

Mao’s list of Liberalisms is drawn against existing social relations, with an awareness that it is essentially a hesitation. His list concerns three sets of problems: those of insufficient commitment to revolution, those of insufficient commitment to the party as the agent of that revolution, and the attempts to preserve old relations by inhibiting the new ones flowering in their place. Liberalism, for Mao and for us, is not merely a lack of radicalism against such a serious enemy. If insufficient radicalism were the only problem, we should throw ourselves entirely into our propaganda departments and sloganeering. Liberalism is a cowardly equivocation, one that knows what is to be done but always stops short. It is the fantasy, that if only we hadn’t struggled, we could have tempered our domination. The liberal knows there will be better rations coming, if only we limit our demands to better rations. But it is also the fear of power, and power’s fundamental character, that it is taken, not shared.

If we are to combat capitalism, and imperialism and domination, and the State that ensures them all, the liberalism must also be among our targets. Many of Mao’s prescriptions remain true today, while others are concerned with the production of a historically specific Chinese Communist Party. We cannot be bound by Mao’s prescriptions, but we must build on the awareness within them, that with a new social order comes new liberalisms to combat.

Liberalism today manifests itself in various ways.

To call on abstraction, on principles and doctrines, the mentality that laws and constitutions are supported by well-drawn maxims. To speak of rights as if the police and the rich are subjecting themselves to their own coercions. To deny that abstraction is another rhetorical trick, to press a people into submitting before their own oppression, this is the first type of liberalism.

To be naive toward, to ignore, deny or obfuscate Struggle as the source of advancement. To speak of things like human rights as if they are inscribed by an eternal order and not fought for and enacted, continuously, by the people, this is the second type of liberalism.

The call to engage with the regime, to propose laws to mitigate the attacks of the ruling class. To become reasonable, when reasonable always means to accept the regime. To celebrate compromise and solidarity with a failed liberal politics as necessary to prevent the domination by Capitalists of a purer strain. To tell ghost stories about the coming reactionary power, to use fear and guilt to demand submission to the voting booth, this is the third type of liberalism.

To say that underneath the violence and exploitation remains a possible utopia, that the state has been betrayed or corrupted. To pretend that Capitalism is anything other than its application, that exploitation is only the effect of incomplete project, to say finally that capitalism has not gone far enough, this is the fourth type of liberalism.

The celebration of reactionary symbolism, cheap reverence of nationalist flags and soldiers and police and constitutions, as if violating these is a greater violence than the system itself. The refusal to acknowledge that these are the devices of the enemy, this is the fifth type of liberalism.

To insist on non-violence and traditional modes of protest, to deify the tactics of different struggles until all others are forbidden, to negate struggle because it shows itself as struggle, and to prefer the peace of police brutality, imperialist aggression and mass exploitation to the fight against it, this is the sixth type of liberalism.

To revive universal guilt by claiming that this or that act will make revolutionaries as bad as their oppressors, to see protest or struggle as an act of moral absolution and superiority, this is the seventh type of liberalism.

The notion of the first-world, that oppression in the countries with the wealthiest capitalists is different from oppressions elsewhere. The shock, that “it can happen here”, when it has been happening all along, this is the eighth type of liberalism.

To claim that those who struggle are idealistic, to be ashamed of your political stance and then to immediately confirm the feeling by claiming that childish or idealistic are something to be. To delight at the presence of leftists, that one can finally be the responsible, rightist party. To venerate reactionary ideologies as somehow more serious, this is the ninth type of liberalism.

To complain that they are trying to destroy you and your comrades, to divest and imprison you, to erase you, to take everything from you, to deny that your enemy will act like your enemy. To cry about hypocrisy, accepting the lies of the enemy as a ground to fight over, to demand consistency or fairness when the regime is perfectly consistent in its domination, exploitation and control, this is the tenth type of liberalism.

To talk about crimes and criminals, to call your enemy madmen and monsters and sinners and barbarians, the slurs composed for the millions in captivity and slavery, this is the eleventh type of liberalism.

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We should return for a moment to Mao, and his First Type of Liberal:

“To let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate. Or to touch on the matter lightly instead of going into it thoroughly, so as to keep on good terms. The result is that both the organization and the individual are harmed. This is one type of liberalism.”

It is still important that criticism and engagement escape the bounds of a traditional social order, but the death of the concepts of kin, of solidarity and affiliation, has been taken up again by Capital’s revolutionary desires. It is the overthrow of social relationships and replacing them with direct exploitation that defines Capitalism. We are not bound to respond in kind, and with our new modes of relating, we should recognize where we have been productive — struggle has produced new kin, and our friends have become our comrades, in perhaps a greater sense than could be said earlier. We must let our kin come to define our struggle, and see in our kin, our comrades. Mao was right that we should not be cowardly with those we love, but it is because kin have no need for cowardice around each other. Their bond is before politics. They can engage each other absolutely, without the homeless, precarious fear that camaraderie will be dissolved by divergent engagements with the struggle. To work against our kinship, our most powerful weapon and the model for our future, is the final type of liberalism.

(Source: illllllllllllli)