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#1

“To Be Attacked by the Enemy Is a Good Thing”: The Struggle over the Legacy of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Socialist Revolution*

By Robert Weil

I
I have always considered Mao Zedong’s statement, “To be attacked by the enemy is not a bad thing but a good thing,” to be among his most valuable. Not only did it alter my conception of struggle, but it encapsulated perhaps more succinctly than any other of his sayings, the dialectical character of his thinking and strategy. It was this quality that allowed Mao to exploit the contradictions among the enemy, to “overcome all difficulties,” and to repeatedly turn defeat into victory. But it was not the losses and suffering from such attacks that Mao was referring to: he was always determined to turn the “bitter sacrifice” required by revolution into “bold resolve.”¹ The reason that to be attacked was a “good” and not a “bad” thing, was that it meant that the revolutionary forces were hurting the enemy, were a challenge to their control, were successfully carrying out the struggle. Otherwise, why would those opposed to the revolution even bother to attack? The less restraint such enemies showed, the more they revealed their own weaknesses and were blinded to reality. “It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.”² The more strongly the revolutionaries were attacked, therefore, the higher the measure of success they must be having. Moreover, a blind thrashing out by those opposing the revolution, guided only by hatred, would cause them to make serious errors and discredit them in the eyes of the people.
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#2

The Aesthetics of Resistance: Thoughts on Peter Weiss

By Inez Hedges

In his three-part novel, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance), published successively in 1975, 1978, and 1981,¹ Peter Weiss accomplished for the working class what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar did for feminist theory in 1979 and what Edward Saïd did for postcolonial studies in 1994.² That is, he provided a sweeping reinterpretation of major elements of the Western cultural canon from the point of view of a hitherto marginalized perspective. To read this novel is to experience a re-education; to be receptive to it is to undergo an intellectual transformation.
           
The novel has long enjoyed a prominent place in the German intellectual left. Now that the first volume is finally available from Duke University Press in a superb English translation by Joachim Neugroschel (with a readable and engaging foreword by Fredric Jameson),³ Weiss’s work can finally emerge into the wider public sphere where it deserves to occupy a prominent space.
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#3

Progressive Cuba-Bashing
                                
By Richard Levins

The Current Debate

In the mid-1960s, when Che Guevara dropped out of sight to begin his guerrilla campaign in Bolivia, some on the left were asking whether Fidel had had him murdered. In the late 1980s, some were quick to assume that the trial of the Cuban general Ochoa on charges of attempting to organize a drug ring in collaboration with the Medellín cartel was really a political purge. What is striking is that these accusations against Cuba were accepted by so many without investigation, as if the abuses that were alleged were only to be expected and therefore must be true.

Why are so many progressives and liberals taken in by even the most outrageous falsehoods about Cuba? Why do they often accept uncritically the line of the Miami and Washington reactionaries about Cuba when they doubt almost everything else from these sources? Possibly some are tired of nay-saying all the conventional wisdoms. They do not want to appear “hard-line” or “ideological,” and rejecting Cuba is a cheap and easy way of being a little more mainstream. Cuba may be relegated by some to the list of youthful enthusiasms from the time when “we thought we could change the world.” This stance is reinforced by the accumulated cynicism of many defeats that says that no place can be all that good, that all dreams come to naught. Or, perhaps since Cuba’s socialism is one of the few to have survived, it has become harder to romanticize it.more...