The Mind is a Factory Shed: The Experience of the Workers Universities in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution

• In Event: “Cure the Sickness to Save the Patient”: Rescuing Thought Work from Cold War Ideology

Abstract

From 1968 to 1976, Shanghai was the political center of a series of experiments called Workers' Universities, which became the focus of a national debate on the relationship between the material and the ideological as embodied in the figure of the worker.
These Universities—independent organizations of workers who took time away from production to study theory—challenged assumptions implicit in the socialist organization of society. They asked whether development of production by itself—without a change in political consciousness and practice—was enough to bring forward the transition to Communism. They questioned the (im)possibility of autonomous political organizations of laborers within a Socialist state. The workers interrogated the material conditions in which their own ideological work took place: they examined concrete elements such as work time, contracts, salaries, technology, and specialization as crucial to the transformation of cultural references and political consciousness.
The political search of the Shanghai workers took the form of attempts at carrying out what workers called “the construction within the superstructure,” i.e. the transformation of labor relationships and political subjectivity with the goal of achieving a Communist society. This paper will analyze two sets of texts, the documents produced by workers themselves and those drafted by the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee and the Central Committee. The comparison between the two highlights how the engagement of workers in theory and the development of autonomous political subjectivities became an existential issue for Maoist state and society.

Author

• Andrea Piazzaroli Longobardi, Sao Paulo University