The looks on the faces of the government front bench say it all. They literally cannot believe what they are seeing. David Cameron is bursting with mirth and happiness – this is beyond anything a Conservative prime minster can dream of. For there on the Table (this item of House of Commons furniture that divides the government and opposition front bench teams should apparently be capitalised) sits The Little Red Book of Chairman Mao. The book that pampered western student revolutionaries touted in the 1960s while cadres of the Cultural Revolution in China carried it as they bullied and punished intellectuals. It sits there on the green baize, bloodily, gorily, insanely and absurdly red, after shadow chancellor John McDonnell produced it, quoted from it and then flung it in George Osborne’s direction, attempting to make a satirical point about Osborne’s cosying up to China, affecting to offer him advice on how he might learn from his new friends – yet apparently not seeing the potential danger of a shadow chancellor seen as “far left” producing the Bible of the far, far, far, far left.

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Cameron’s incredulous hilarity is understandable. For almost a century, since the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Conservative party and Conservative press have at times thrown accusations of Marxism revolutionary aims and Communist sympathies at the Labour party – a party that has for most of its history been in reality a moderate, cautious, broad church of reformists and centrists and sensible trade unions. To make the Marxist slur even start to stick, forgeries and exaggerations were needed. In 1924 the infamous forged Zinoviev Letter published by the Daily Mail purported to prove links between the Bolshevik regime and the British Labour movement.

But in 2015 there’s no need for any dirty tricks from the right. In this picture McDonnell has just played a dirty trick on his own party. He’s brought one of the defining icons of revolutionary Marxist politics into the House of Commons, brandished it and quoted it, leaving it to glare in all its redness on the parliamentary Table. He may as well have unfurled the red flag, climbed up to the strangers’ gallery and waved it about while declaring a people’s soviet. Perhaps that is his next astute political move.

Part of the strangeness of that book lying there, red as the people’s blood, is that Osborne and Cameron were babies back in the days when it had political currency. Apart from anything, this bizarre outmoded political symbol shows McDonnell’s age. At 64 he is just two years younger than his leader, Jeremy Corbyn. He was young in the 1960s. Was he a Maoist? According to Osborne who picked it up and opened it, the Little Red Book is “his own signed copy”.

This treasured personal item doesn’t just place McDonnell in political space (way over leftward... bit further... further than that...) but cultural time.

So he’s a romantic 60s revolutionary, eh? He must have been one of the radicals John Lennon tried to talk to in his 1968 song Revolution: “But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao You ain’t gonna make it with anyone, anyhow.” The western radical fetish for Mao and his book of wise sayings only flourished in that age, when students were on the streets in Paris and even the Rolling Stones endorsed “violent revolution”.

For this reason, Mao’s book thrown down in the Commons is perhaps a less sinister and dangerous image than it might be if the ideology it embodies still had any currency whatsoever. The 45 million victims of actual, historical Maoism in China are as remote from this scene as Maoism is remote from modern British reality. Though of course, there is the current court case involving allegations of abuse in a Maoist commune.

So what was McDonnell trying to say? That his economics are as lucid as a Godard film? That he’s going to reduce us to poverty so we can rediscover the virtues of a simple workerist existence? Or that he wishes he were back in the 60s or early 70s when you just needed to chant and march?

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The bit of Mao he quoted – urging us to learn economics from all quarters – is actually not far from his own argument in a Guardian opinion article published this summer, when he said: “ordinary working people have to manage on incomes significantly lower than the likes of George Osborne and his friends in the City. They could teach the bankers and many commentators a thing or two about managing a budget responsibly. Given the opportunity, we will use the sound common sense of our people.” In light of this picture and McDonnell’s chosen quotation from Mao it would seem he not only reads the Little Red Book but is influence by its ideas.

Yikes. I was student Marxist in the 1980s but I don’t remember anyone quoting Mao. That was already well in the dustbin. We read Antonio Gramsci and tried to understand how Thatcherism had achieved a “hegemony” that was transforming British culture and politics. McDonnell should read Gramsci instead, or Eric Hobsbawm. The best Marxist thinkers saw the need to negotiate the complexities, and realities, of politics and symbolism. Letting yourself be portrayed as a Maoist is probably the very first thing Gramsci would counsel against.

It’s great to pose as Citizen Smith when you’re 19 but most of us grow up. McDonnell is shadow chancellor, and he was answering a major economic statement with all the intellectual bite of Wolfie, the south London revolutionary in the 1970s comedy. I heard a rumour that Citizen Smith is coming back to our screens. Looking at this picture it seems that it already has.