Egalitarian Inventions and Political Symptoms: A Reassessment of Mao’s Statements on the “Probable Defeat

In the last two decades of Maoism, the search for new perspectives of egalitarian politics generated unbridgeable discontinuities within the “political episteme” of the socialist states of the time, which appeared “symptomatically” in a series of statements of Mao converging on the issue of the “probable defeat”. A defeat that concerned both the results of the Cultural Revolution and the destinies of the socialist states. However, far from expressing capitulationism, Mao’s statements were strong appeals to political mobilization. In earlier essays, the author had examined those statements as a path for reassessing the heterogeneity of the Cultural Revolution with respect to the overall destinies of the Communist parties of the 20 th century. The reflection on Stalinism promoted by Crisis & Critique is the occasion for reassessing Mao’s positions in a larger context.