Over the past few days, Paris has witnessed what the establishment calls "riots." They, along with the right wing, have blamed everything on "that group of populists and the far-left wearing progressive cloaks." Now, a voice seems to be emerging within the left itself, arguing that this riot is "disorderly, manipulated, and populist," and that we should take the moral high ground to oppose it.

Many of us have fallen into a misconception: isolating the "in-itself to for-itself" stage of historical revolutions, thereby denying the progressive nature of the early spontaneous stage and dismissing it as a "chaotic riot." We forget that in the early days of a revolution, under the suppression of the old society and in the absence of a widely unified, organized, and ideologically guided party, the forced, angry, and spontaneous revolution of the masses is precisely the force that inflicts the first cracks upon the old world. Only after this can new ideas—previously suppressed in the old society—be tested, filtered, and compete to find the most suitable one. Only through continuous struggle can the masses weed out opportunists, completing the progression from the initial "in-itself" to angry spontaneity, and then to rational self-consciousness, allowing the vanguard to finally lead them into a revolution "for-itself." Yet today, many people sever the spontaneous stage from the subsequent conscious stage, viewing the earlier "chaotic riot" and the later "great revolution" as two entirely different things. The problem is that revolution is not a dinner party; it is an irreconcilable struggle of one class against another. We cannot use the limitations and backwardness of the early chaotic phase to deny the overall progressive nature of the movement, nor can we forget that this is the inevitable path from spontaneity to consciousness and purposiveness.

Before the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, France experienced months of "food riots" triggered by climate disasters and soaring flour prices, and hundreds of such riots occurred across France in the first few months of 1789 alone. At the time, starving Parisian citizens, artisans, and sans-culottes had hardly read any Enlightenment philosophy. Their initial demands upon taking the streets were extremely raw and desperate: seizing bread, smashing granaries, and punishing profiteering racketeers.

The bourgeois liberal representatives of the time were actually filled with terror when looking at these ragged "mobs" on the streets brandishing clubs and meat cleavers. Originally, they only wanted a moderate constitutional monarchy reform and did not want to blow things out of proportion. Yet it was precisely this seemingly "unorganized and purely venting" grassroots spontaneous violence that directly challenged the troops mobilized by the king to suppress the parliament. When people attacked the Bastille in search of gunpowder, the old regime's most powerful symbol of terror collapsed with a roar. Without the seemingly irrational "smashing and looting riots" triggered by hunger among tens of thousands of ordinary people tearing open the breach ahead, the bourgeois representatives in parliament wouldn't even have been able to pass a single piece of paper. This chaotic, spontaneous riot forced the entire French society onto the irreversible path of the Great Revolution.

In early 1917, most of the core cadres of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party were still in exile or operating underground. However, on February 23, 1917, International Women's Day, textile workers in the Vyborg District of Petrograd could no longer endure the protracted war, hunger, and cold, and spontaneously walked out of their workshops into the streets.

At the time, major leftist parties—including the Bolsheviks—initially believed the "conditions were not ripe" and even urged the women workers to remain calm. But this strike, ignited by women and hungry workers, rapidly escalated into a city-wide general strike, which in turn triggered a collective mutiny of the Tsar's garrison troops.

This entirely "leaderless and purely spontaneous" riot completely opened the curtain on the February Revolution that buried the Romanov dynasty. In the ensuing months, the country plunged into immense disorder, with a dual power structure pitting the Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies against the bourgeois Provisional Government. It was precisely through the repeated education of this chaos, trial and error, betrayal by the bourgeois government, and bloody suppression that the broad masses rapidly gained "class consciousness" within just a few months, ultimately choosing the Bolsheviks who represented their interests and ushering in the victorious "for-itself" October Revolution.

After the failure of the Chinese National Revolution in 1927, Chinese Communists retreated to the countryside. In places like Hunan and Jiangxi, peasants who had long suffered under the cruel oppression of feudal landlords spontaneously organized peasant associations, smashed the gates of local tyrants and evil gentry, confiscated their property, and even forced notorious bullies to wear tall paper hats while paraded through the streets. Facing this muddy, spontaneous movement filled with clan vendettas and violent venting, not only did the Kuomintang right-wing frantically curse it as a "ruffian movement" and "mob disorder," but even some leaders within the Party panicked, feeling that the peasants were too radical and chaotic, and advocating for a "sudden brake."

Mao Zedong withstood immense pressure to conduct on-the-ground investigations and wrote the famous Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan. He explicitly pointed out: "The opinions of the Kuomintang and all the right-wingers—'it's terrible' versus 'it's fine'—represent a difference in class viewpoint." The seemingly excessive and chaotic spontaneous destruction by the peasants was precisely the inevitable release of energy after thousands of years of suppression.

Therefore, chaos and disorder in a spontaneous revolution are not grounds for denying its progressive role in the macro-historical process. Naturally, we must oppose opportunists and extremists who engage in looting, taking advantage of the chaos. But if we abandon the masses—or even side with the establishment to support absolute suppression—simply because a section of the establishment and the right wing takes things out of context to amplify the impurities within the movement, do we risk repeating the errors of the 1848 Revolutions, the Paris Commune, the Second International, and May '68, even if the situation may not necessarily escalate to armed confrontation?