You can ask her again.
It seems like this passage is a bit muddled about internal and external factors. Can being oppressed count as an internal factor? Shouldn’t it be that their attitude toward being oppressed is the internal factor?
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I think being oppressed should count as an internal factor.
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Why is that? Oppression isn’t a contradiction within his own mind or body.
Internal causes are closely related to one’s own practice. I feel like I may not have fully figured out what practice actually is, which is why I’ve never had a very clear understanding of internal causes.
Indeed, even when facing the same oppression, different people will have different views.
I feel like I was being a bit too left-leaning when I just straight-up insulted him back then. I definitely can’t do that again in the future.
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6.6
- Why haven’t I been coming lately?
This week I’ve still been avoiding struggle. In everyday life I’ve run into some problems, like communication issues and propaganda issues. Originally, I could have discussed these with everyone on the forum. Several times when I went on the forum I wanted to bring these problems up, but then I got afraid people would ask about security issues, and I backed off again. After the last time I brought up this issue and got shut down, I just completely gave up and stopped coming altogether. In my mind I figured I’d stay holed up, read some books on my own, talk with classmates, and wait until I got a phone before discussing things with everyone—it wouldn’t be too late then. But reality has long proven that once I detach from the forum, I also detach from ideological struggle, and my thinking stops progressing; instead, I start wanting to regress. What that leaves me with is a very empty spiritual world. What goes through my mind is: what if I can’t beat my parents in the future? What if I get beaten to death by those damned parents? What if the Confucian father uses violence? In short, I just can’t correctly understand myself and the class enemy. In the end my life keeps sliding backward: visiting porn sites, reading pornographic material and masturbating, still being opportunistic in my studies—only some of my English homework and Chinese homework are copied. I still don’t dare completely break with private ownership, but my opportunistic grades are actually dropping. Obviously, this drop is only an accidental one, not because I’ve resolved to give up opportunism. Later I thought about whether I could borrow some money from a classmate to get a VPN, even for just a month. H is relatively free and gets fewer special approvals, so he can use money, but right now he only has nine yuan left in WeChat. I asked him whether he could first ask his parents for forty or fifty yuan. He said he’d only asked for 100 half a month ago and doesn’t have the face to ask again, so that matter was shelved too.
- On H’s right opportunism
During May Day I discussed with everyone in People’s Square the serious right opportunist and revisionist mistakes H had made, so that Monday I criticized him:
Me: So aren’t you going to evaluate your mistakes?
H: I definitely had problems before, (meaning roughly that his answers during the period when he was commenting on petite-bourgeois feminism definitely had problems, not that the things he said when being criticized had problems).
Then I brought up his point about the practice of minors, where he wrongly believed that only doing the right things under the guidance of advanced thought could count as practice. I refuted that view.
Then I said: You say minors don’t have a general sense of right and wrong, so the three cardinal guides and the five constant virtues you memorized aren’t a sense of right and wrong?
He said: Didn’t I say they didn’t have any at the time?
Me: You did say that.
H: Then maybe I typed too fast at the time.
Me: But that also reflects a problem in your thinking. There’s an idealist problem in your thinking, and besides, if you say things like that, aren’t you yourself a minor? That way of pointing fingers at others is way too much!
H:… (silence, no longer speaking)
About a day or two later, I said he could go work in a factory once he turned 16. He said his family didn’t support him doing that; his family had some kind of illness, and if he went to be a worker the whole family would collapse. What he’s saying now is exactly like what C (LLCM) said during winter break. But this time it may be a bit harder to handle, because his parents aren’t as reactionary as C’s and haven’t yet taken off the disguise of bourgeois democracy.
That week I kept asking him: since you don’t want to go be a worker and you don’t want to be opportunistic, then in the future you’ll end up as a petty bourgeoisie. But the petty bourgeoisie always faces the risk of bankruptcy and ultimately becomes the proletariat, so what are you going to do in that situation?
H actually said something that shocked me a lot: Then maybe later I can try to be opportunistic
At that moment I was a bit annoyed inside. It felt like he just said it so casually; it was shameless, especially coming from someone who already has some understanding of Marxism. But I still went on and asked him: Then aren’t you afraid of becoming everyone’s class enemy?
H: Shouldn’t be… I guess? I don’t know…
I didn’t know what else to say. The next morning I told C about this, and he said, Isn’t that just like him during winter break? I then said he’s trying to take the capitalist road. C agreed with that view, but he thought we still needed to pull him back a bit, after all he himself had also broken out of the Confucian parents’ scam. But it would definitely be harder than with C. H’s parents are even more sinister and cunning, trying to fool H through seemingly democratic means, mainly corrupting his thinking; this can be seen from H’s early condition. He used to be a liberal, promoting the capitalist system as the best system, believing human nature is selfish, so communism could never be achieved.
- On C’s left opportunism
Me: The other day you directly cursed at the Confucian mother, saying she needed to rely on your opportunism to get rich. I feel like that’s a bit too left opportunist; you can’t do that anymore in the future.
C: Anyway, in the end we’re all going to get out, so say whatever you want.
Me: Then aren’t you afraid they’ll say you’ve been incited by ultra-left forces?
C: He’s not that smart.
Me: Then aren’t you afraid they’ll say it’s foreign forces?
C: How could they be that smart? You think too highly of them.
Me: Class enemies are all very cunning. One should despise the enemy strategically while taking the enemy seriously tactically. If you don’t take the enemy seriously tactically, aren’t you afraid they’ll launch a sneak attack from behind?
C:…
It feels like he’s still too naive about the class enemy. The bourgeoisie is just stupid, not brain-dead; there are plenty of counterrevolutionary methods.
- Propaganda to B
Because last Sunday I read that post about capitalist restoration, I wanted to talk to him about the reasons behind China’s capitalist restoration. I brought up the roots of the bourgeoisie within the Party, the spontaneous petty-bourgeois tendencies inside the revolutionary camp, the infiltration of opportunists, the corruption of revolutionary cadres, and the fact that no one led the movement after the great leader died, and so on. I also talked about some later movements in which the masses rose up in resistance. He couldn’t help but sigh: It feels like not many of the mass movements in our country were successful… I said: Because there was no Communist Party leadership, the mass movements were confined to spontaneous activity, so they failed. He also said his maternal grandfather worked at the factory that built Dongfanghong No. 1. I asked him what his maternal grandfather did during the Cultural Revolution, and he said he didn’t do anything. That feels a bit suspicious—why wouldn’t he have done anything? He also said his grandmother once shook Chairman Mao’s hand, so I asked whether his grandmother had participated in the Cultural Revolution and been a Red Guard or something like that, and he also said no. Something feels off.
Is “The Sword of the Republic” about maintaining the kind of lifestyle mentioned earlier while criticizing others?
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I feel that what C said is right. It’s basically speculation to get rich, and there’s nothing to hide about that. Might as well say it plainly; that would also completely expose the fraud of family ties. And in fact, that’s exactly how it is anyway—sooner or later, it will be said like that. Besides, the parents themselves already know this is speculation. I feel that Zhijian seems to be attacking other people, using a bit of knowledge to put them down, and what he said wasn’t clear either: how exactly do you prevent a sneak attack from behind, how do you look down on it, how do you take it seriously? Instead, he throws the problem back at the other person. Since everyone will be going into industrial work in the future, and we’re all comrades, we should criticize each other and help him think through solutions in detail. The parents haven’t even come to attack him yet, and Zhijian’s big label has already been thrown out. If C’s ideological awareness isn’t that high, then making mistakes is perfectly normal. No one is born knowing how sinister and cunning the reactionaries are. Being able to fully consider the whole situation, make a reasonable plan, and adapt as circumstances change is already very difficult. So if a carefully considered plan ends up being too radical or too conservative compared with reality, it can be corrected; it’s not as if slapping on a big label of either “left” or “right” deviation can solve the problem.
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You’re right. I did indeed start putting other people down once I learned a bit of knowledge. I didn’t know anything at first, but I still wanted to act all high and mighty and resort to bureaucratic behavior.
Well, I think it’s necessary to criticize myself first
I’m going to write a self-criticism. My bureaucratic issues have been left unresolved for a long time, and it’s time to really lay out the criticism.