"Published forty years after Mao's death, Alessandro Russo's Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture must be seen as the first book that studies China's Cultural Revolution from the intellectual point of view of the central question of this extraordinary movement itself: what can the real destiny of the communist idea be after fundamental experiments at the level of the state power in Russia and China? Across a precise experience made of readings of all sort of texts written in the fire of the movement or after, historical clarifications of some crucial sequences, personal inquiries, and intellectual synthesis, Russo simultaneously proposes a sort of complex but clear image of the event and an essential examination of its strategic goals and final failure. All that in the direction of a clear understanding of the possibility of a new communism."–Alain Badiou