Club Jacobin

babylonfalling:

UCLA witches hex the Regents

Photo by Roy Walford for Los Angeles Free Press (1969)

vanguardpartyintheusa:

The women of the high sierra, like the women of the tropical rain forest, have never had anyone they could trust to represent their interests in the Peruvian government. Most of them would not be able to speak to government officials directly even if they were invited to do so, because they do not speak the same language. In conversations among themselves, they speak of “Peruvians” as foreigners, as people of “another world,” but one that affects them more and more. The campensino union, which recently began to recognize the rural women’s right to a voice in deciding their own future, did so only after many women of the sierra had begun to turn to open insurrection against the state. In the central provinces of Ayacucho and Apurimac, it was the guerrillas of Sendero Luminoso who began, in the 1980s, to provide a dramatic outlet for women’s frustration and anger against the powerful men who controlled their destinies.

Kimberly Manning, “Making a Great Leap Forward? The Politics of Women’s Liberation in Maoist China” (via club-des-jacobins-morts)

The Great Leap ended in catastrophe, resulting in tens of millions of excess deaths.^[3] Estimates of the death toll range from 18 million^[4] to 45 million,^[5] with estimates by demographic specialists ranging from 18 million to 32.5 million.^[4] Historian Frank Dikötter asserts that “coercion, terror, and systematic violence were the very foundation of the Great Leap Forward” and it “motivated one of the most deadly mass killings of human history.”^[6]

The years of the Great Leap Forward in fact saw economic regression, with 1958 through 1961 being the only years between 1953 and 1983 in which China’s economy saw negative growth. Political economist Dwight Perkins argues, “enormous amounts of investment produced only modest increases in production or none at all. … In short, the Great Leap was a very expensive disaster.”^[7]

In subsequent conferences in 1960 and 1962, the negative effects of the Great Leap Forward were studied by the CPC, and Mao was criticized in the party conferences. Moderate Party members like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping rose to power, and Mao was marginalized within the party, leading him to initiate the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

^*

^{>tumblr leftists in charge of not being supportive of state orchestrated mass murder
>tumblr leftists equating the mass murder of tens of millions of innocent people, the collapse of a nation’s economy and social well being to something that was great for women’s liberation.}

shiggy diggy day a wiggidy woo

(via diarrheaworldstarhiphop)

Oh wow, the Great Leap Forward was actually bad? How embarrassing for me! I’m so glad that someone came along and quoted Wikipedia to set me straight.

Or no, actually — like anyone else who grew up in a society where anti-communist lies and distortions are common currency, I’ve almost never heard the Great Leap mentioned without breathless denunciations of the bloodthirsty tyrant Mao and sympathy for those poor innocent Chinese ground under his heel.

The thing is that unlike you, I read past the first Wikipedia article to come across my browser and eventually I realized that there is exactly zero evidence of the “mass murder” and Communist perfidy of the usual telling, and that the actual legacy of the GLF is much more mixed.

It turns out that the available evidence overwhelmingly points to a well-intentioned and plausible campaign to develop the country’s economy, which failed overall because of an unprecedented series of floods and droughts, the major loss of Soviet aid, as well as human level at individual and systemic levels. It should go without saying that the death counts are endlessly inflated in a political and academic environment where there are no penalties for exaggerating any bad aspects of communism. I’m a little bit surprised that Wikipedia limits itself to claiming 45 million dead — check back in a couple weeks and you’ll probably learn that Mao personally killed 80 million people during this period.

This is exactly the context for the quote that I originally posted. The Mao-as-monster school of history not only turns the GLF into a three-year orgy of fire and death but it also overlooks inconvenient facts like the fact that Chinese women themselves experienced it as a high point of liberation. For example, one of the systemic or institutional errors which exacerbated the food problems during this period was the creation of public mess halls across the country — which freed women from the burden of cooking for their families but also proved wasteful of food overall.

The period also succeeded in creating infrastructure which underlay the agricultural stability of the following period, which is why China has never again suffered from famine — something never achieved over such a timespan in 3,000 years of imperial history. But that’s a subject for another post.

If you’re actually interested in learning about this period, I would suggest first of all looking at this review which shows the utter fraudulence of the Dikotter book which you quoted via Wikipedia. Then read Joseph Ball on “Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward?” If you want a more detailed academic investigation by an author who is certainly no communist, try Y. Y. Kueh’s Agricultural Instability in China, which precisely analyzes the relative contributions of weather, technology and human error in causing the failure of the GLF as well as more accurately estimating the relevant casualty numbers.

Nice reaction pic tho.

(Source: clubjacobin, via diarrefpuckhookyplay-em-offs)

Kimberly Manning, “Making a Great Leap Forward? The Politics of Women’s Liberation in Maoist China”

clubjacobin:

Five female Soviet snipers during World War II.

So I’ll reblog this to problematize my own posting of it (along with those other pics this morning). I don’t usually do the “commie women with guns” posts not because they’re not cool and transgressive but because it seems crucially incomplete to show these images without also discussing how in most cases after liberation was won or the war crisis was over, the prior prevailing gender roles often returned either in whole or in part.

If political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, then why has the literal carrying and use of guns by women in revolutionary movements done so relatively little to challenge patriarchy in these societies after liberation? Is it because the women were not carrying guns in the pursuit of independent autonomous women-led political movements? And if so, how do we read these images?

Curious if anyone knows about good writing that has been done on this subject.

They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.

They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism.

Every miscarriage is a work accident.

Homosexuality and heterosexuality are both working conditions…but homosexuality is workers’ control of production, not the end of work.

More smiles? More money. Nothing will be so powerful in destroying the healing virtues of a smile.

Neuroses, suicides, desexualization: occupational diseases of the housewife.

“Guns, Sisters, Guns.” (Red Star No. 5, March 1971.)

Yan Xu, “We Are One Family: Woman Work in the Chinese Anti-Japanese Communist Bases”

Comrade Jayapuri, President of the All-Nepal Women’s Association (Revolutionary). Here you can read an interview she gave a few years back with some Western activists.

catladyinwaiting:

inspired by other true stories of street harassment, here’s (of what i can remember) a few things that have been shouted at me while biking:

• hey baby
• move it
• pedal faster!
• wanna race?
• think you can keep up with me?
• why you pedaling so fast, baby?
• damn, girl
• nice ass
• work it baby
• fucking cyclist
• ugly faggot
• i hope you die, fag
• why don’t you smile?
• you should smile
• it’s a nice day, baby, smile
• i said hi, baby
• won’t you say hi
• give me a lift?
• where you going?
• I SAID WHERE YOU GOING?
• fuck you, bitch
• show me your tits
• get off the road, bitch.

i can’t remember anymore. it’s not fun to remember, either.

this is why i wear headphones while biking. sure, it’s dangerous. but now i can pretend i can’t hear these guys. 

(the aggressive smile-demanders are, in my opinion, the worst. i’m very obviously female, so the “ugly fag” comments were from the wintertime, when i wear coats, and apparently appear to the average frat-boy-on-a-frat-house-balcony to be a gay man, whereas in the summer, these same dudes probably yelled “show me your tits!” at me.)

Things that were shouted at me during seven years of daily biking to and from campus:

Fuck patriarchy.