It was Mao Zedong who, in the throes of the Cultural Revolution he unleashed in China in the 1960s, came up with the concept of a never-ending cultural revolution, wave succeeding wave, purging and removing people who, only a few days before, had been at the very top of the country.
Reading the accounts of what happened on Friday at Labour's general conference reminded me of this, minus of course the humiliation, the purges and the violence.
Party leader Joseph Muscat spoke of the need for the party to be ready to change and change again. That's quite rich coming from the person who has so changed the party as to make it well-nigh unrecognisable. In the eight years he has been at the helm, the party's most visible symbols have been removed and consigned to history - the party hymn, the party flag, the party's visual identity in short.
Last Sunday, when Simon Busuttil waved his party's flag, claiming, mistakenly, that it was 100 years old, the sight reverberated most among the old Labour core which has never forgiven Dr Muscat for doing away with his party's visual symbols. You could feel the envy even in the fake shocking tones used on One News.
It should have been the other way round: Labour removed its symbols and won, and here was a leader of the party that had suffered the biggest drubbing in Maltese history who was not jettisoning his party's symbols but actually glorying in them.
The same scene was repeated on Friday. Removing the rule whereby the deputy leader for party affairs cannot be an MP might seem trivial. In fact, it was approved by all the party members who turned up, minus one. But it was another tassel in a long process.
Joseph Muscat created the Moviment to fight the election side by side with the Labour Party. Today's government is made up of Labour and Moviment in almost equal shares. But, progressively, the Moviment people are becoming more and more important, holding the more important posts and being seen more and more as the future.
The Party's structures, coalesced around Toni Abela, will soon be put out to pasture. That seems clear, at least, from the leader's words.
The same process is discernible on the other side too. With a secretary-general that has not come up the party ranks, hand-picked by the leader, with an executive committee based on positive discrimination and with many of the party's war horses being put aside, the Nationalist Party is also having its Cultural Revolution.
Yet there is no rejection of the past, as one feels there is on the Labour side. This, I feel, is crucial, considering the current mass lack of trust of people in general in politicians of whatever hue. To remove all traces of the past gives in to this mass lack of trust as if they are all to be condemned and kicked aside. The two parties make up Malta's political history and the achievements of the past. There have been aberrations too. But time and again, the two parties have come together in crucial times to work together and to take decisions that mattered.
It is also true that the two parties have developed structures that are pervasive, far too big and cumbersome and which restrict the rest of civil society. Think of the party clubs in every town and village, think of the elaborate, pervasive, intrusive structures around every election, think especially of the television stations they own, so costly in money terms and even more in terms of human resources.
Where to go from here is anybody's guess. They seem to lurch from big to bigger and it is difficult to see them relinquishing at least voluntarily what they have collected.
The two parties, however, taken together, encapsulate Malta's soul. If the past is to show the way to the future, there is no future for Malta unless it comes from the interplay, the dialectic, between the two parties. (This does not mean there is no space in Malta for a third party. But it is difficult objectively for a third force to emerge, although this is theoretically possible.)
It is a strange scenario that we seem to be moving into, where one of the two seems to be in self-destruct mode, or at least moving towards an attenuation of its presence.
The coming change in Labour is not from one person to another, nor just a small amendment to the party rules (which the other party, if I am correct, does not even have) but a change of emphasis: from Labour to the Moviment. Increasingly, the Moviment will gain in importance and increasingly the party will lose.
Yet what is the Moviment? It was created by Dr Muscat as a means of roping in one-time PN voters who could be attracted, as in fact they were, to try Muscat. Does it have an ideology? It does in a way, for it was responsible for the batch of civil rights legislation that has come into being, from divorce to same-sex civil unions, to the new bill removing vilification laws, etc. We seem to have exhausted the 'things to do' shopping list, at least for the foreseeable future. So what else? Is there life after civil unions?
The Moviment is not a party, it does not have rules or structures, as you would find in a party in a governing coalition - which is the case in many countries. It is sui generis, amorphous, ironically set up by the leader of the party leading the coalition. It is ambiguity writ large.
Labour is in trouble with the electorate - so the polls tell us - because of widening concerns about corruption. It is not possible to apportion blame between the party and the Moviment: they are probably both responsible. In fact, it may also be that the dichotomy helped loosen internal controls to the point where corruption became possible.
But there is one facet in the Zedong precedent that should really worry us, and especially the old, loyal, Labour core. The Cultural Revolution removed the structures and made it easier to get rid of incumbents and to replace them with new people who had not come up through the party structure. Later on, when it ran itself into the ground (not before killing millions and forcing those with brilliant brains to go and work in the fields) everyone realised it was nothing less than a naked grab for power, unfettered by structures, rules or precedents.
It led, as similar strategies inevitably will, to the personalisation of power, concentrated in the hands of the leader who could not do wrong. Except when he, disastrously, did.
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