The Politics of "Dismissal" Continue... as the Deniers of "Pluralism" Devolve into Blind Factionalism

Asad Haider, "Dismissal: The relevance of the Cultural Revolution"

The phenomenon that emerges from the amalgamation of dismissal and pluralization is “factionalism,” and for Russo it indicates the fundamental limit of the Cultural Revolution. Factionalism describes the process by which, through arbitrary splits and alliances, the indeterminate plurality of organizations was reduced to a framework of two. The self-authorization of organizations was no longer at stake; now the factions would confront each other in fighting directed toward political or military supremacy. Instead of maintaining independence from the party-state, the factional organizations sought to become the nucleus of a new party-state, constituted by the process of dismissal and annihilation of the opposing faction. The Cultural Revolution had devolved into “grotesque brawls” between youths, whose struggle for power soon led to the exhaustion of the political energies that had only recently come into being.