Monkey Riding Dragon
28th August 2010, 18:15
What follows is my finished article reassessing China's history with socialism in general and the Cultural Revolution in particular and highlighting the need for a commune-based vision of socialism as part of that. PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK!
Be forewarned though, it's kinda lengthy: it amounted to 13 single-spaced pages on a regular Word document, encompassing over 7,600 words. So you may want to read through this when you have a lot of time on your hands or in multiple sittings. I worked very hard on this though and DEFINITELY WANT SOME INPUT!
Okay, here goes...
THE CASE FOR A NEW, COMMUNE-BASED SOCIALISM
INTRODUCTION
Before I actually get started with what I have to say, I think it’s going to be important for the reader to first get a sense of the central problem I’m aiming to identify and break out of through example. Below you’ll find a link to a late-2004 interview with Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, wherein he contextualizes China’s Cultural Revolution, explains some reasons why it was necessary, describes its character and some of its historic achievements, and then criticizes what he sees as certain shortcomings that its conduct featured, in particular calling for a 100 Flowers Campaign style of societal openness regarding the role of intellectuals and artists to be understood as necessarily at least a more or less permanent characteristic of future socialist societies if we’re serious about bringing a communist world into being, and also recognizing the need to establish a new type of communist party in the future; one that’s based on the formulation “solid core with a lot of elasticity” rather than classical “democratic centralism”. Before proceeding further with this article, please go ahead and take a listen to the full contents of the interview.
Michael Slate interviews Bob Avakian on China, the Cultural Revolution, Art, and Dissent (http://www.revcom.us/avakian/MSlate_Interviews/BTS-03-29-05-48.mp3)
(http://www.revcom.us/avakian/MSlate_Interviews/BTS-03-29-05-48.mp3)
So what’s wrong with that, you ask? Well my criticism isn’t per se directed at the main thrust of what BA was speaking to there, upholding the Cultural Revolution as the greatest advance toward communism the world has yet seen and putting forward criticisms of its conduct, but rather at a real shortcoming that permeates a lot of the content: dogmatism.
Throughout the interview linked above, Bob pretty one-sidedly upholds just about everything Mao ever did and, on one level or another, rejects just about everything Mao wasn’t personally associated with. That much is hard to miss. Even his proverbial guided tour of China’s revolutionary history is all portrayed from Mao’s perspective, as if no one else made any relevant or distinguishable contributions (that were good) to the Chinese socialist revolution as a whole or to the Cultural Revolution in particular. In point of fact, similar thinking is woefully prevalent throughout the (genuine) world communist movement. Now it’s not only a good thing, but a vital thing (lest we communists indeed become “residue of the past” rather than a “vanguard of the future”) that Bob makes (sometimes valid) criticisms of the shortcomings of this crucial historical experience, but my point is that we need to be willing to examine socialist history in a more critical way that doesn’t wholly or near-wholly revolve around the perspective of a particular individual, even if that individual did indeed contribute an extraordinary amount of new and vital things to the science of communism, as Mao did. Instead, we should carefully re-examine the historical record in a way that more fully recognizes the definition of socialism and that much more fully takes a broad range of perspectives, including historical perspectives, into account to develop a correct understanding and synthesize the corresponding lessons for today and tomorrow. The purpose of this article will be to initiate that comprehensive re-examination by providing a new perspective on the historical record, starting with what I think is the most important point in that record: China’s Cultural Revolution. First, however, it will be important to provide a reassessed contextualization of that.
REVOLUTIONARY CHINA: A BRIEF OVERVIEW
State capitalism was a transitional aspect of new democratic revolution. The basic concept of new democratic revolution was in part that, in oppressed nations, it's possible to forge a very broad united front for the revolutionary seizure of power because there are even capitalists who, as a result of their principally patriotic loyalties, are willing to support revolution and socialism. It should be deeply grasped by people here that large chunks of the third world bourgeoisie are not even as affluent as and have less access to capital than many first world workers! Hence those who argue that it's just automatically wrong or impossible for communists in the third world to forge a revolutionary united front with the patriotic (i.e. potentially insurgent) capitalists in their respective countries might just as well argue against uniting the whole of the proletariat here!
Mao's argument for achieving socialism through a process of state capitalism is based on the principle of holding this revolutionary united front together, such that the more bourgeois third world elements come to more fully adopt the communist moral position of production for the purpose of serving society rather than for private accumulation. And yes the patriotic third world bourgeois elements can be won over to that morality and, in that sort of way, ultimately be brought to rupture concretely with capitalist relations. This was the essence of Mao's argument. And the approach was successful, mind you. Socialism was basically achieved in China by 1958. The Great Leap Forward that was initiated in that year was in part an attempt at consolidating the victory of socialism in China. Hence why I argue in my new Maoist theory that the failure of the Cultural Revolution to bring back the basic (albeit an altered) model of large scale communes was a clear hallmark of revisionism. It shows that the leadership of the country ultimately just gave up on the idea of consolidating socialism.
Also, this basic character of the Great Leap Forward -- being oriented toward consolidating socialism -- is the real, underlying reason it was opposed by the Soviet Union. The social-imperialist USSR aimed to keep China economically subordinate to itself. In order for that to be a reality, there needed to continue to be a significant array of capitalist economic relations in China. Hence shortly after the Great Leap Forward got going, the Soviet Union pulled out its economic advisers and blueprints and imposed a trade embargo on China in protest, forcibly exiting China from the Cold War and, in part, undermining the economic success of the Great Leap in terms of socialist accumulation, as well as forcing the Chinese Communists to increasingly recognize the Cold War for what it actually was: a high-profile rivalry between two giant imperialist superpowers and their respective spheres of influence in which communists should have no part.
So during the 1960s especially, a real crisis situation emerged in China. Partly as a result of how China had successfully forged its revolution (which never would have happened in any principally different way!), the communists were united with these nationalist elements who, especially with increasing pressure resulting from the USSR's embargo, were exerting increasing sway over the government and the Communist Party as a whole. And they unfortunately won a broad array of concessions in the course of the early-to-mid '60s and were clearly aiming to achieve full-fledged rapprochement with the United States, such that China might have some sort of powerful trade patron on which for private enterprises to rely. The Cultural Revolution was an attempt at defeating that tendency ideologically and achieving new revolutionary victories in the process. Hence it was formulated as a basic question of "the socialist road or the capitalist road?". The bottom line here is that Mao significantly underestimated the direness of the situation and accordingly prescribed an inadequate solution. The truth is that the state and Communist Party themselves were structurally flawed in fundamental ways that would objectively tend to direct them back to capitalism under such averse circumstances. As such, they really needed to be completely destroyed and replaced by a whole new people's state and by a new communist party, the respective embryos of which should have been the Red Guards, the Shanghai Commune, and the Cultural Revolution Group.
There were some in the leadership of the country (most heavily concentrated in the Cultural Revolution Group) who, more fully than Mao, recognized how bad the situation was and came closer to recognizing what needed to really be done. This included people like Lin Biao and Jiang Qing. Anyhow, the upsurge of the Cultural Revolution really lasted from 1966 to the fall of 1967, after which point the army had basically brought authentic revolutionary progress to a halt. By the end of the year, the Cultural Revolution Group had been purged of many of its genuinely revolutionary members and its paper, Red Flag, made to stop publication. Whereas Mao himself supported these measures, I tend to assess that Mao himself became, for all practical purposes, a revisionist at some point in 1967 or at least had clearly begun making enormous mistakes in that year. The subsequent year saw the Red Guards ordered to stand down to the army and then increasingly punished by being shipped off to the countryside. Finally, after the Soviet Union began conducting border raids on China in March of 1969, by the start of the next month the old CP, essentially suspended during the Cultural Revolution, had been reconstituted under Mao's leadership. By the summer of that same year, the Red Guards were officially disbanded. By the end of 1971, most, if not all, of the revolutionary members of the Politburo had been removed. Early the next year, an initial rapprochement with the United States had been achieved. You get the picture. Overwhelmingly, things headed downhill after the fall of 1967. The counterrevolution was consolidated with the coup of 1976, wherein the remaining revolutionary leaders in the state, including the so-called gang of four, were arrested. And that was the decisive end of socialism in China.
A REASSESSMENT OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND OF THE COURSE FOR THE FUTURE
By 1962, it was clear that China was headed down the road back to capitalism. The country’s top leaders, both in the state and in the Communist Party itself (e.g. Liu Shaoqi as president and Deng Xiaoping as party leader), over the course of the early-to-mid ‘60s systematically downsized the communes, re-implemented professional management schemes and material incentives, plainly promoted rapprochement with the United States in the face of the growing contradiction between China and the Soviet Union, and just generally put economic pragmatism in command. This emerging economic pragmatist philosophy was perhaps best concentrated in Deng Xiaoping’s famous statement from 1961 that “I don’t care if it’s a black cat or a white cat. It’s a good cat so long as it catches mice.” This rhetoric was meant to imply that as long as China’s economy grew, it didn’t matter whether it did so in a socialist way or in a capitalist way.
The struggle to get back on the socialist road to communism began in earnest with Mao’s launching of the socialist education movement that year. This movement, which sought to put revolutionary (and eventually specifically Maoist) politics in command of the education system and thereby change the overall cultural life of the nation to a socialist one, ran through 1965 and was soon joined with a related campaign promoting the essential type of thinking concentrated in Lin Biao’s reforms of the People’s Liberation Army, which did away with insignia and ranks, ended special officer privileges, restored the Yenan type soldier-worker-peasant combinations, combated officer caste mentality, and promoted Maoist politics generally within the army. It’s important not to negate the historic importance of this movement! While it’s obvious that this movement failed to achieve its central objective of transforming the whole culture of the society to a socialist one, it’s also clear that it left a big impression on large portions of the youth, many of whom would, based on this inspiration, subsequently become the Red Guards of China’s Cultural Revolution. So we see the importance of having political movements like this in the socialist school system itself.
In January of 1965, Mao and a select few key others recognized that the problem was worse than originally thought and that there was a need for a full-fledged Cultural Revolution. A special Five-Man Group was established to promote the idea of a radical transformation of the society. It accomplished very, very little and was replaced in the spring of 1966 by the Cultural Revolution Group, which Mao tasked with, rather than continuing to try and accomplish radicalization through the machinery of the party and the state, instead leading a popular rebellion against the revisionist elements in power toward the aim re-conquering the party and state. This was truly radical! Never before had any communist leader suggested it was correct to fight “a revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat” to prevent counterrevolution! And I find it to hardly be coincidental that the great worldwide revolutionary upsurge of the late ‘60s just so happened to largely coincide with China’s Cultural Revolution. People all over the world looked to what was going on in China and lifted their heads! People everywhere were inspired by this massive upsurge in China! After all, their own governments were suppressing them in their attempts to challenge the old policies and norms. To this China stood in stark contrast. In China, unlike anywhere else in the world, leading people in the society supported popular rebellion against their own state! This signified to people throughout the world that China was a very different kind of society; the kind that the restless youth of that era would want to live in and could take heart from. We should never ever distance ourselves from the principle of the Cultural Revolution!
Obviously, however, the Cultural Revolution was ultimately defeated and capitalism restored. So the question that now emerges is ‘what went wrong?’. For the duration of this article, I’m going to be arguing that the most important flaw of the Cultural Revolution was the goal Mao had set out for it: the goal of bringing China back onto the socialist road by transforming the existing state and the existing Communist Party. This will bring us around to problems that we still face today, such as the inability to adequately distinguish authentic communist tendencies from revisionist ones as well as problems of our hitherto vision of socialism itself. One thing I do want to emphasize though before continuing is that you’ll notice that the revolutionary tendency in China united not around Leninist Marxism, as far too many comrades seek to do today, but around the most advanced communist synthesis available to them: in their case, what they called Mao Zedong Thought and what we today call Maoism. We need to learn this lesson much better and apply it far more fully!
Anyhow, to begin on the record of the Cultural Revolution itself, I’ll start out by pointing out the contrast between its most important stated goal and the end result.
Mao’s famous giant poster, Bombard the Headquarters (from August 6, 1966) states: “China's first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster and Commentator's article on it in People's Daily are indeed superbly written! Comrades, please read them again. But in the last fifty days or so some leading comrades from the central down to the local levels have acted in a diametrically opposite way. Adopting the reactionary stand of the bourgeoisie, they have enforced a bourgeois dictatorship and struck down the surging movement of the great cultural revolution of the proletariat. They have stood facts on their head and juggled black and white, encircled and suppressed revolutionaries, stifled opinions differing from their own, imposed a white terror, and felt very pleased with themselves. They have puffed up the arrogance of the bourgeoisie and deflated the morale of the proletariat. How poisonous! Viewed in connection with the Right deviation in 1962 and the wrong tendency of 1964 which was 'Left' in form but Right in essence, shouldn't this make one wide awake?”
You’ll find it hard to miss that Mao viewed the downsizing of the large-scale communes as a “right deviation” at the outset. Likewise we find in the Central Committee’s famous 16 Points that came out three days later, defining the objectives of the Cultural Revolution, the following description: “At present, our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic "authorities" and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.” Here we find the goal clearly defined: the consolidation of socialism, which was, as we’ll recall, what was attempted in the Great Leap Forward. The radical transformation of all the “parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base” was premised on the objective of facilitating “the consolidation and development of the socialist system”. The fact that this consolidation of socialism never occurred even after the party was reconstituted under Mao’s leadership then should strike us as highly significant! I point this out because woefully few comrades even discuss this matter! But what led to this contrast between the central objective on the one hand and the outcome on the other? Let’s start with what I view as the most important event of the Cultural Revolution.
Throughout the latter part of 1966, a rising tide of radicalism, initiated by the local Red Guards and spread to the local factories, was increasingly sweeping Shanghai. A large number of worker-based groups were formed in the process. In early November, many of these groups banded together to form the Headquarters of the Revolutionary Revolt of Shanghai Workers led by Wang Hongwen. On January 3rd, Lin Biao and Jiang Qing, employing the local media and cadres, initiated the January Storm against the municipal government of Shanghai. Two days later, the Shanghai Workers’ Headquarters called for a general uprising against the city government, and the following day over a million people rose up and overthrew it. Over the course of the following month, members of the Cultural Revolution Group (namely Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan) led a revolutionary reorganization of the city political structure through which the masses established the Shanghai People’s Commune on February 5th. In many respects, this was the height of the Cultural Revolution. The Shanghai People’s Commune was loosely modeled on the Paris Commune, featuring the self-government of producers as the most defining element. However, it also featured a higher degree of specifically communist leadership (e.g. some general direction provided by Zhang) than had the Paris Commune. This contrasting feature is something that I think should be understood as decisive in terms of the model’s basic sustainability. Unlike the Paris Commune of old, there is no evidence to suggest that the Shanghai People’s Commune could not have survived indefinitely. Unfortunately however, more conservative leaders of the Cultural Revolution, including Mao himself, ceased to think so. Though Mao had initially supported both the January Storm and commune-style reorganization, he came to oppose the commune approach to municipal reorganization based on standard arguments about the short life span of the Paris Commune, calling instead for the Commune to be replaced with a Revolutionary Committee: a triple-alliance of local workers, cadres, and elements of the People’s Liberation Army. Whereas Mao enjoyed great prestige at the time among the revolutionaries, his opinion weighed heavily and the revolutionary committee model was implemented just 19 days after the establishment of the People’s Commune in Shanghai. I’ve focused in on this particular development because I think it showcases a very real and more potent approach to the Cultural Revolution that could have come forward, but was instead rejected. This was a crucial error! The Shanghai People’s Commune could have and should have become an approximate model for emulation nationwide and the Red Guards systematically dispatched to organize revolutionary headquarters of producers throughout the country on a locale-by-locale basis to prepare the ground for a whole China-wide wave of popular power seizures. The communes individually thereby established might then have organized a new people’s army with which to liberate China as a whole and replace its old state and party institutions with a new state based approximately on this Shanghai People’s Commune model and a new communist party born out of the Cultural Revolution Group. Indeed, once again, Mao himself had originally favored the commune model, but was dissuaded by the more conservative revolutionary committees that were also established in January and February of 1967 in Shanxi province and in Harbin, wherein the PLA soldiers had assisted the local revolutionaries in seizing power.
Another important 1967 development that’s worth highlighting specifically is the Wuhan Incident, wherein, following an attempt by the local revolutionary people in the Wuhan Workers’ Headquarters to seize power, divisional commander General Chen Zaidao and the “Million Heroes” reactionaries on his side conducted a siege against them. Zhou Enlai issued an order from Beijing for Chen to lift the siege, which was ignored. Subsequently, two members of the Cultural Revolution Group, Xie Fuzhi and Wang Li, were dispatched to Wuhan and on July 16th ordered the general to switch from supporting the Million Heroes to supporting the Workers’ Headquarters. Chen’s response was to have his army division kidnap both Xie and Wang on the 20th. A mass demonstration erupted in protest of the general’s actions. Zhou Enlai now opted to personally fly to Wuhan to resolve the incident. At General Chen’s direction, however, tanks and other military units surrounded the local airstrip and prevented his plane from landing. At that point, it had become clear that peaceful negotiation was impossible. On July 22nd, Jiang Qing advised the Red Guards to replace the army if necessary. The incident itself was only resolved when Beijing sent in three infantry divisions, several navy gunboats, and an air unit to intercept Chen’s forces, forcing him to surrender and freeing Xie and Wang. This incident was a concentration of the increasingly prevailing attitude of hostility toward the Cultural Revolution in the PLA amongst the generals. Major opposition to the Cultural Revolution from high profile military figures indeed had been voiced early on therein. Accordingly, Lin Biao and Jiang Qing had called on the Red Guards to spread revolutionary struggle to the army and transform it in that way. The Wuhan Incident marked the onset in earnest of increasing armed resistance to this on the army’s part. Hence it was very appropriate and advanced that Jiang Qing had called, in the midst of this situation, for the army’s replacement where needed. But again, this really lacked the proper form required to be victorious. The PLA was still mistakenly being viewed by the revolutionary leadership as being simply in need of reform through struggle, not of comprehensive and permanent replacement by a new people’s army. This was an important opportunity to learn how thoroughly non-reformable the existing state, including its armed bodies, really were that was at least largely missed. But we also see that Jiang Qing had come closer than others to recognizing what was truly necessary. We should uphold that.
It’s important to highlight the Wuhan Incident because it wasn’t an isolated phenomenon, but the beginning in earnest of a whole new dynamic. From early on, the PLA had generally opposed and sought to suppress the Red Guards and the masses more broadly. Now, for the next year or so, the Cultural Revolution would in significant portion be a protracted struggle (including armed struggle) between the Red Guards and the PLA, the outcome of which would, in no small part, determine the outcome of the Cultural Revolution itself. It is no exaggeration to say that the army became the main enemy of the Red Guard movement and of the Cultural Revolution Group itself and persistently remained the state body least affected by the Cultural Revolution. September of 1967 was a decisive moment, when Mao ordered the arrest of the “May 16th Corps” of the Cultural Revolution Group, including Wang Li, hero of the Wuhan Incident and original formulator of “continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Wang’s “May 16th Corps” had been a key, informal, and leading body within the Cultural Revolution Group that promoted the struggles of the Red Guards against the army and advocated power seizures from below. This was part and parcel to orders at the same time for the PLA to ‘restore order’ in China. Nearly all of the Group’s members would be arrested by the end of the Cultural Revolution. But specifically with this initial act purging the Group of its leading revolutionary element and ordering the army to ‘restore order’, the Group itself became almost immediately, for most practical purposes, defunct and power seizures rapidly ceased to take place essentially from below. By November, the Cultural Revolution Group had been ordered to stop publishing its journal, Red Flag. What all this signified, among other things, was Mao’s decisive shift to the right, now mostly supporting the army against the Red Guards. From this point forward, the authentic revolutionaries were mostly on the defensive.
The ensuing year was characterized by the PLA taking the lead in the Cultural Revolution, conducting power seizures nationwide. This leads us to the character of the revolutionary committees. The majority of revolutionary committees created rapidly came to be dominated by the army due to the fact that the army had military force at its disposal to enforce its will. For example, in the leadership of the revolutionary committee in Shanghai, 7 out of the 13 members were army officers. 20 out of 29 provincial revolutionary committees were chaired PLA officers, and in several provinces PLA soldiers chaired up to 98% of revolutionary committees above the county level. More often than not, in the interests of stability and order, the army allied with cadres on the committees against the more radical organizations of the masses. At the end of September 1968, only revolutionary committees in Shaanxi and Hubei provinces were chaired by civilians. Furthermore, the majority of those that sat on the revolutionary committees as representatives of the people were those who had had a stake in the pre-Cultural Revolution order of things rather than radicals from the movement itself.
All this marked a decisive abandonment of mass-based methodology. The more the army took the lead, the more the Red Guards were suppressed and punished. On July 27th, 1968, the Red Guards’ authority over the PLA was officially ended with Mao’s full support. In December, Mao initiated the Down to the Countryside “Movement” wherein “young intellectuals” (namely Red Guards) were subjected to a type of labor reform. They were moved for the cities to the countryside, where they would cause less social disruption.
Then came the border clashes with the Soviet Union in March of the following year. By April 1st, the Chinese Communist Party had been reconstituted under Mao’s (now-revisionist) leadership. The main purpose for the party’s re-constitution was the establishment of a new foreign policy. Even before April 1st, Mao had already turned to the likes of Chen Yi and Deng Xiaoping for the development thereof. The Red Guards were disbanded formally by the summer. The party now effectively regained its direct hand over the army and thus effectively gained control of two elements of the triple alliances that formed the revolutionary committees: the cadres and the army. Thus these committees progressively became less and less revolutionary as the leading revolutionaries in the party were gradually purged. And the next two years did indeed see the purging of the main revolutionary leaders in the party, including the former Cultural Revolution Group leader Chen Boda and hitherto second-man-in-command Lin Biao.
Let’s discuss Lin Biao for a moment. Lin Biao had initially opposed reconstituting the party, though he did participate in it after the fact. What we see with him over the next two years or so from 1969 to 1971 is his increasing conviction that his original position on that was correct and that Mao himself was on the wrong road. For example, Lin opposed punishing the Red Guards with the Down to the Countryside draft and had maintained calls for a “Flying Leap” consolidation of socialism, i.e. the reinstatement of the large-scale communes. When he was purged and, in the summer of ‘71, saw Mao attempting to initiate rapprochement with the United States, small forces in the PLA supportive of him (out of the relative few that weren’t already revisionist and supportive of the rapprochement, that is) swung into action, laying out plans for and carrying out a series of coup attempts apparently aimed at killing Mao and closing down the CCP. Wrong methodology aside, the main point here is that Lin came fairly close to recognizing the situation for what it was and this was the core motivation behind the coup attempts. These efforts, if fully successful, would have likely, in the immediate term, restored the pre-December-1968 status quo plus the large-scale communes, which by that point would have been a qualitative improvement in the objective situation. Lin’s forces were among the few who had come to realize that Mao himself was now a revisionist and that’s the main thing I want to highlight about them. It was principally Lin Biao who had synthesized the concept of Maoism in the first place. Thus with the emergence of this divide between him and Mao himself, we come to see that two basic types of Maoism had clearly emerged: a left wing Maoism and a right wing Maoism. This is why I tentatively call myself a left wing Maoist: I want to at least partially identify with varying trends that were leading elements in the Cultural Revolution which Mao himself eventually moved to the right of.
The ensuing years consisted of clear moves supporting U.S. hegemony around the globe. I don’t think I even need to elaborate on this subject at great length, so I won’t, but to at least passingly mention a particularly egregious example that comes to mind, we can obviously see this motivation behind China’s support for the U.S.-sponsored military dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile from 1973. From the disbanding of the Red Guards, there was no remaining independent revolutionary, communist force in China that we know of. All the remaining leading revolutionary elements instead were in the state itself, and generally in more secondary positions therein after 1971. Their leading elements were concentrated in what is often referred to as a “gang”, eventually known as the “gang of four”, consisting mainly of former Cultural Revolution Group members. The main concern of this group after ‘71 was Zhou Enlai’s powerful influence on policy. He had always been more a skillful diplomat than a serious communist revolutionary (even as a member of the CRG) and now used his power as premier and in the Communist Party to re-enter China into the Cold War and to bring open revisionists like Deng Xiaoping back into the Politburo of the CP. To that end, Jiang Qing’s ridiculous campaign against Lin Biao in ‘73-74 was really directed at Zhou, as if to suggest that he and the (somewhat wrongly) disgraced Lin had something in common: apparently, they were both adherents of Confucianism. The bizarre nature of this campaign was, above all else, an expression of Jiang’s sentimental unwillingness to break politically with her husband, despite his obvious right wing turn. This quite apparent inconsistency weakened the impact of her message. When Zhou died in early 1976, Deng attempted to capitalize on sympathy for him to build a movement to unseat Mao, for which of course he was removed from power. But after Mao himself died later that same year, there was confusion as to who might fill the vacuum of leadership at that point. Without Mao there to influence her choice of actions, Jiang quickly turned to the building of people’s militias for the purpose of leading the masses in seizing power from the reactionary elements. This was more the correct approach to the situation than Lin’s had been. But by that time it was really too late. The revisionist elements in the party and in the state were overwhelmingly dominant and they quickly conducted a power seizure of their own wherein hundreds died and thousands were arrested, including all members of the “gang of four”. This marked the definitive end of socialism in China.
This by no means indicates that the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969) accomplished nothing. To name some of the specific accomplishments of the Cultural Revolution...
-Far from undermining the already-backward school system, as per the common Western myth, the Cultural Revolution instead greatly increased the access of the people thereto precisely by challenging the old authorities thereof and the elitist practices that remained therein. We see that, as a result, during the period immediately following the Cultural Revolution, enrollment in all levels of schooling greatly increased. In the case of secondary education, enrollment nearly quadrupled! And youth of any background for the first time in Chinese history were enabled to apply for a college education. (Previously, university admittance relied on Confucian practices, like being screened through a series of competitive entrance exams for entrance to a hierarchy of increasingly selective prep schools, to more or less minimize the number of entrants and maintain schooling as something reserved for ‘special people’ and as a way to “get ahead” of others.) By 1973, 90% of school-aged children were enrolled in school. Among many other things, the literacy rate greatly increased as a direct result.
-Health care was successfully brought to the countryside for the first time. The feat was accomplished by way of a nationwide “barefoot doctors” program introduced as part of the Cultural Revolution. This program systematically trained both peasant youth and urban youth in basic medical practices and knowledge (both traditional and Western) and sent them out to the countryside to set up medical facilities and provide preventative care and basic treatments for free or at a very low cost (on average, $1 or $2 a year) to the vast peasantry. Even the World Health Organization acknowledges that the barefoot doctors program was a “successful example of solving shortages of medical services in rural areas”. After the program was abolished in 1981, the population percentage covered by the medical system fell off dramatically: from 90% to less than 5% in just 3 years. No program of comparable effectiveness has yet replaced it.
-The level of artistic and cultural expression greatly improved. The Cultural Revolution Group, especially under Jiang Qing’s direction, introduced a broad range of model revolutionary works of art and often tours of the country were undertaken to show them as broadly as possible. Previous to this time, artistic expression in China was usually comparatively primitive and typically still revolved around feudal themes like tales of emperors and concubines. Now, with these advanced model works inspiring the masses, there was a veritable explosion of both involvement in the arts and of artistic creativity! The brilliant and beautiful model works were often world-class works of art by the standards of the time, combining traditional Chinese forms with Western instruments and techniques. And the themes conveyed therein put the masses, their lives, and their role in society and history front and center. All this inspired the people, including peasants and working class people, to take up art, including music, dance, poetry, painting, short stories, and even film, in much larger numbers. Cultural troupes and film units multiplied in the countryside. To suggest the impact of this in terms of the working masses getting into cultural life, when over the early ‘70s Beijing held 4 national fine arts exhibits (attracting a record audience of 7.8 million), 65% of the works therein were created by amateurs! This was an expression of the explosion of artistic interest and creativity that swept the country as a result of the changes of the Cultural Revolution!
-As still another way in which the oppressive division of labor was broken down during and as a result of the Cultural Revolution, “open-door research” in the natural sciences was introduced. As in the doors of laboratories were literally swung open to the involvement of workers, universities set up extensions of labs in factories and neighborhoods, and research institutes were spread to the countryside and involved peasants. As Raymond Lotta has noted vis-a-vis the latter, “Peasants, alongside specialists from the cities, carried out experiments in hybrid grains, conducted studies of insect-life cycles, and other aspects of science in agriculture. This helped the masses come to understand scientific questions and the scientific method; and helped scientists gain a better sense of conditions in society, including in the countryside.” Popular primers helped make scientific knowledge much more widely available and accessible.
-And yes, economic management did become more equitable. One-man management schemes were broken down into new “3-in-1 combinations” of workers, professional technicians, and Communist Party personnel to oversee the day-to-day management of workplaces. This meant that workers (a tiny few anyway) spent time doing managerial work and professional managers (a tiny few anyway) spent time on the floor actually doing productive work for a change. The “3-in-1 combinations” weren’t really that much of a change, but they did impact the way workplace decisions were made in a way that was more favorable to the views of actual workers.
Neither was the ‘casualty toll’ of the Cultural Revolution anywhere near as high as the commonly-circulated “estimates” we see courtesy of The Black Book of Communism. In one YouTube video that clearly gets its info from this source, we find it estimated, for example, that the Cultural Revolution killed 30 million people. Even the Chinese government, which arrests people for promoting the Cultural Revolution, estimates that a total of “34,274” people died as a result of the Cultural Revolution’s course. This is barely 0.1% of the total conveyed in the YouTube video as a fact! For a full-fledged revolution taking place on such a scale (China having been, of course, the world’s most populous nation), that’s a pretty damn small death toll, in fact! Let’s dare to compare this with the American Civil War, for example...
-In the American Civil War, 600,000 people out of 28 million died.
-In China’s Cultural Revolution, less than 35,000 out of 600 million died.
...just to put that in perspective and yeah to kinda say “look whose preaching”. Moreover, the 30 million statistic is literally impossible. That would imply that about 5% of the population was wiped out in the course of 3 years. Were anything remotely like that the case, it would have registered in the overall life expectancy of the population. Instead, in no small part as a result of the barefoot doctors program introduced as part of the Cultural Revolution, life expectancy in China rapidly increased throughout this period. Average Chinese life expectancy under Mao indeed roughly doubled from 32 years to 65 years. So yeah, seriously, we need to be capable of greater critical thinking than that which is promoted by The Black Book of Communism and we need to insist on greater critical thinking than that among the people. If anything, the Cultural Revolution was far too tame, not far too violent! No more than 3% of the CP cadre were even expelled in the course of the events in question. That’s hardly what you might call a draconian purge or a lapse into chaos. Claims to either effect are total bullshit and should not be accepted!
Yes, there were excesses during the Cultural Revolution, just as there are inevitably in any revolution. But my point is that, if you take a look at the positions of the pro-Mao parties out there in the world today, you’ll find that practically all of them (including the RCP) basically blame the Red Guards, Jiang Qing, and Lin Biao for the victory of the revisionists. Take another listen to that interview with Bob Avakian I highlighted earlier for a fairly typical example. When one looks to the various pro-Mao parties out there for an assessment of the Cultural Revolution, one finds that dogmatism and liberalism are (dogmatically!) assessed to have been the main problems. In truth, the main problem was revisionism, as the left wing Maoists consistently identified.
To begin wrapping this all up on the Cultural Revolution, let’s, while recognizing the real achievements of the Cultural Revolution and rejecting the lies and slanders about it, come back again to the contrast between the main objective and the outcome. Momentum toward the Cultural Revolution began building up in 1962 with the launching of the socialist education movement in protest of the downsizing of the large-scale agricultural communes. The principle purpose of the Cultural Revolution again hence had been the reversal of that verdict. The restructuring of the education system and other achievements of the Cultural Revolution were not originally viewed as ends in themselves, but as the means by which to reverse the verdict to which I’ve just spoken. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution with a radical new vision of socialism based on people’s communes in mind. He aimed get a commune-based system of socialism established nationwide, both in the rural and urban areas. But when the first revolutionary committees came along, Mao jettisoned this radical new vision for a much more conservative one based on those committees. The more this happened...the more the emphasis on the leading role of the army and of the party increased...the more divorced both the new vision of socialism itself and the methodology of its achievement became from the masses. The revolutionary committees quickly became just another variant of the old Soviet-style, party-state approach and they tended in the precise same direction: the restoration of capitalism. This shows them to have been fundamentally structurally flawed.
Commune-based socialism has surfaced time and again throughout modern history and usually more or less spontaneously: in France, in Hungary, in China, and elsewhere. This strikes me as more than coincidental. The whole point of Mao’s 1958 break with the Soviet party-state approach to socialism was to establish a much more mass-based kind. Mao had viewed the party-state type as too divorced from the masses; too elitist, really. The Great Leap Forward launched in that same year marked the birth of commune-based socialism as a Leninist system. More than anything else, this is what separated Maoism from all other schools of Marxism. Maoism was thus developed by Mao in this way and subsequently synthesized by a host of others on the left wing of the CCP (most importantly by Lin Biao though, and generally during and as part of the socialist education movement). In a basic way, it was then systemized and applied in the form of the upsurge of the Cultural Revolution before being increasingly jettisoned by Mao himself. In this sense, Maoism was a leading factor in China from 1958 to early 1967, after which point people other than Mao and of lesser prestige became its principle advocates. In describing myself as a left wing Maoist, I’m defining myself as one who upholds a modification of the commune-based system of socialism that originally defined Maoism rather than the party-state type of system that’s upheld by those who more or less uncritically uphold every historical twist and turn in Mao’s views. Left wing Maoism has continued to exist in varying forms since the time of Mao; it has never died out. This, however, represents the first comprehensive synthesis of it as such (to my knowledge anyway); as something distinct from the right wing forms of Maoism that have prevailed since early ‘67 and down to the present. Left wing Maoism most essentially means commune-based socialism with the communist vanguard party leading the way. That’s what I’m proposing.
I also think it easily noticed at this point that there was clearly a certain failure on Mao’s part to adequately identify who was the enemy and likewise to apply the corresponding solution. Mao recognized that the enemy continually appears in the party, even under socialism, but neglected to tolerate the organization of factions. My point on that is that factions are inevitable. We can recognize them or try to suppress them. But when we choose the mechanistic approach we lose out on both our ability to distinguish revisionists and on the sort of open debate that brings forward the truth of things more fully, which we absolutely need to develop a correct communist synthesis at any given point. There are also other basic structural flaws to traditional (i.e. Stalin-inspired) forms of democratic centralism that I think it would be more important to debate in a different context.
What we need in an overall sense today is a more advanced synthesis of left wing Maoism. But first we have to recognize the essential correctness of left wing Maoism. That’s my argument.
As a concluding note, again I think it no coincidence that the rebellious movements of the 1960s climaxed amidst China’s Cultural Revolution (again, 1966-1969) and then increasingly fell apart after that point. Although this global upheaval was inspired by a lot of things, the Cultural Revolution was definitely a major factor. It is likewise no coincidence that nothing like the tone of this time has been replicated on the same scale since then. The Cultural Revolution was the most advanced expression of revolutionary politics that has ever come forward in the history of the world. To advance in a renewed way toward the goal of world revolution and the establishment of communism worldwide, we must consult and deeply reassess the events in China from this particular time. That’s what I’ve attempted to do here. I hope you’ll help me continue this effort by providing your thoughts on all this.
Be forewarned though, it's kinda lengthy: it amounted to 13 single-spaced pages on a regular Word document, encompassing over 7,600 words. So you may want to read through this when you have a lot of time on your hands or in multiple sittings. I worked very hard on this though and DEFINITELY WANT SOME INPUT!
Okay, here goes...
THE CASE FOR A NEW, COMMUNE-BASED SOCIALISM
INTRODUCTION
Before I actually get started with what I have to say, I think it’s going to be important for the reader to first get a sense of the central problem I’m aiming to identify and break out of through example. Below you’ll find a link to a late-2004 interview with Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, wherein he contextualizes China’s Cultural Revolution, explains some reasons why it was necessary, describes its character and some of its historic achievements, and then criticizes what he sees as certain shortcomings that its conduct featured, in particular calling for a 100 Flowers Campaign style of societal openness regarding the role of intellectuals and artists to be understood as necessarily at least a more or less permanent characteristic of future socialist societies if we’re serious about bringing a communist world into being, and also recognizing the need to establish a new type of communist party in the future; one that’s based on the formulation “solid core with a lot of elasticity” rather than classical “democratic centralism”. Before proceeding further with this article, please go ahead and take a listen to the full contents of the interview.
Michael Slate interviews Bob Avakian on China, the Cultural Revolution, Art, and Dissent (http://www.revcom.us/avakian/MSlate_Interviews/BTS-03-29-05-48.mp3)
(http://www.revcom.us/avakian/MSlate_Interviews/BTS-03-29-05-48.mp3)
So what’s wrong with that, you ask? Well my criticism isn’t per se directed at the main thrust of what BA was speaking to there, upholding the Cultural Revolution as the greatest advance toward communism the world has yet seen and putting forward criticisms of its conduct, but rather at a real shortcoming that permeates a lot of the content: dogmatism.
Throughout the interview linked above, Bob pretty one-sidedly upholds just about everything Mao ever did and, on one level or another, rejects just about everything Mao wasn’t personally associated with. That much is hard to miss. Even his proverbial guided tour of China’s revolutionary history is all portrayed from Mao’s perspective, as if no one else made any relevant or distinguishable contributions (that were good) to the Chinese socialist revolution as a whole or to the Cultural Revolution in particular. In point of fact, similar thinking is woefully prevalent throughout the (genuine) world communist movement. Now it’s not only a good thing, but a vital thing (lest we communists indeed become “residue of the past” rather than a “vanguard of the future”) that Bob makes (sometimes valid) criticisms of the shortcomings of this crucial historical experience, but my point is that we need to be willing to examine socialist history in a more critical way that doesn’t wholly or near-wholly revolve around the perspective of a particular individual, even if that individual did indeed contribute an extraordinary amount of new and vital things to the science of communism, as Mao did. Instead, we should carefully re-examine the historical record in a way that more fully recognizes the definition of socialism and that much more fully takes a broad range of perspectives, including historical perspectives, into account to develop a correct understanding and synthesize the corresponding lessons for today and tomorrow. The purpose of this article will be to initiate that comprehensive re-examination by providing a new perspective on the historical record, starting with what I think is the most important point in that record: China’s Cultural Revolution. First, however, it will be important to provide a reassessed contextualization of that.
REVOLUTIONARY CHINA: A BRIEF OVERVIEW
State capitalism was a transitional aspect of new democratic revolution. The basic concept of new democratic revolution was in part that, in oppressed nations, it's possible to forge a very broad united front for the revolutionary seizure of power because there are even capitalists who, as a result of their principally patriotic loyalties, are willing to support revolution and socialism. It should be deeply grasped by people here that large chunks of the third world bourgeoisie are not even as affluent as and have less access to capital than many first world workers! Hence those who argue that it's just automatically wrong or impossible for communists in the third world to forge a revolutionary united front with the patriotic (i.e. potentially insurgent) capitalists in their respective countries might just as well argue against uniting the whole of the proletariat here!
Mao's argument for achieving socialism through a process of state capitalism is based on the principle of holding this revolutionary united front together, such that the more bourgeois third world elements come to more fully adopt the communist moral position of production for the purpose of serving society rather than for private accumulation. And yes the patriotic third world bourgeois elements can be won over to that morality and, in that sort of way, ultimately be brought to rupture concretely with capitalist relations. This was the essence of Mao's argument. And the approach was successful, mind you. Socialism was basically achieved in China by 1958. The Great Leap Forward that was initiated in that year was in part an attempt at consolidating the victory of socialism in China. Hence why I argue in my new Maoist theory that the failure of the Cultural Revolution to bring back the basic (albeit an altered) model of large scale communes was a clear hallmark of revisionism. It shows that the leadership of the country ultimately just gave up on the idea of consolidating socialism.
Also, this basic character of the Great Leap Forward -- being oriented toward consolidating socialism -- is the real, underlying reason it was opposed by the Soviet Union. The social-imperialist USSR aimed to keep China economically subordinate to itself. In order for that to be a reality, there needed to continue to be a significant array of capitalist economic relations in China. Hence shortly after the Great Leap Forward got going, the Soviet Union pulled out its economic advisers and blueprints and imposed a trade embargo on China in protest, forcibly exiting China from the Cold War and, in part, undermining the economic success of the Great Leap in terms of socialist accumulation, as well as forcing the Chinese Communists to increasingly recognize the Cold War for what it actually was: a high-profile rivalry between two giant imperialist superpowers and their respective spheres of influence in which communists should have no part.
So during the 1960s especially, a real crisis situation emerged in China. Partly as a result of how China had successfully forged its revolution (which never would have happened in any principally different way!), the communists were united with these nationalist elements who, especially with increasing pressure resulting from the USSR's embargo, were exerting increasing sway over the government and the Communist Party as a whole. And they unfortunately won a broad array of concessions in the course of the early-to-mid '60s and were clearly aiming to achieve full-fledged rapprochement with the United States, such that China might have some sort of powerful trade patron on which for private enterprises to rely. The Cultural Revolution was an attempt at defeating that tendency ideologically and achieving new revolutionary victories in the process. Hence it was formulated as a basic question of "the socialist road or the capitalist road?". The bottom line here is that Mao significantly underestimated the direness of the situation and accordingly prescribed an inadequate solution. The truth is that the state and Communist Party themselves were structurally flawed in fundamental ways that would objectively tend to direct them back to capitalism under such averse circumstances. As such, they really needed to be completely destroyed and replaced by a whole new people's state and by a new communist party, the respective embryos of which should have been the Red Guards, the Shanghai Commune, and the Cultural Revolution Group.
There were some in the leadership of the country (most heavily concentrated in the Cultural Revolution Group) who, more fully than Mao, recognized how bad the situation was and came closer to recognizing what needed to really be done. This included people like Lin Biao and Jiang Qing. Anyhow, the upsurge of the Cultural Revolution really lasted from 1966 to the fall of 1967, after which point the army had basically brought authentic revolutionary progress to a halt. By the end of the year, the Cultural Revolution Group had been purged of many of its genuinely revolutionary members and its paper, Red Flag, made to stop publication. Whereas Mao himself supported these measures, I tend to assess that Mao himself became, for all practical purposes, a revisionist at some point in 1967 or at least had clearly begun making enormous mistakes in that year. The subsequent year saw the Red Guards ordered to stand down to the army and then increasingly punished by being shipped off to the countryside. Finally, after the Soviet Union began conducting border raids on China in March of 1969, by the start of the next month the old CP, essentially suspended during the Cultural Revolution, had been reconstituted under Mao's leadership. By the summer of that same year, the Red Guards were officially disbanded. By the end of 1971, most, if not all, of the revolutionary members of the Politburo had been removed. Early the next year, an initial rapprochement with the United States had been achieved. You get the picture. Overwhelmingly, things headed downhill after the fall of 1967. The counterrevolution was consolidated with the coup of 1976, wherein the remaining revolutionary leaders in the state, including the so-called gang of four, were arrested. And that was the decisive end of socialism in China.
A REASSESSMENT OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION AND OF THE COURSE FOR THE FUTURE
By 1962, it was clear that China was headed down the road back to capitalism. The country’s top leaders, both in the state and in the Communist Party itself (e.g. Liu Shaoqi as president and Deng Xiaoping as party leader), over the course of the early-to-mid ‘60s systematically downsized the communes, re-implemented professional management schemes and material incentives, plainly promoted rapprochement with the United States in the face of the growing contradiction between China and the Soviet Union, and just generally put economic pragmatism in command. This emerging economic pragmatist philosophy was perhaps best concentrated in Deng Xiaoping’s famous statement from 1961 that “I don’t care if it’s a black cat or a white cat. It’s a good cat so long as it catches mice.” This rhetoric was meant to imply that as long as China’s economy grew, it didn’t matter whether it did so in a socialist way or in a capitalist way.
The struggle to get back on the socialist road to communism began in earnest with Mao’s launching of the socialist education movement that year. This movement, which sought to put revolutionary (and eventually specifically Maoist) politics in command of the education system and thereby change the overall cultural life of the nation to a socialist one, ran through 1965 and was soon joined with a related campaign promoting the essential type of thinking concentrated in Lin Biao’s reforms of the People’s Liberation Army, which did away with insignia and ranks, ended special officer privileges, restored the Yenan type soldier-worker-peasant combinations, combated officer caste mentality, and promoted Maoist politics generally within the army. It’s important not to negate the historic importance of this movement! While it’s obvious that this movement failed to achieve its central objective of transforming the whole culture of the society to a socialist one, it’s also clear that it left a big impression on large portions of the youth, many of whom would, based on this inspiration, subsequently become the Red Guards of China’s Cultural Revolution. So we see the importance of having political movements like this in the socialist school system itself.
In January of 1965, Mao and a select few key others recognized that the problem was worse than originally thought and that there was a need for a full-fledged Cultural Revolution. A special Five-Man Group was established to promote the idea of a radical transformation of the society. It accomplished very, very little and was replaced in the spring of 1966 by the Cultural Revolution Group, which Mao tasked with, rather than continuing to try and accomplish radicalization through the machinery of the party and the state, instead leading a popular rebellion against the revisionist elements in power toward the aim re-conquering the party and state. This was truly radical! Never before had any communist leader suggested it was correct to fight “a revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat” to prevent counterrevolution! And I find it to hardly be coincidental that the great worldwide revolutionary upsurge of the late ‘60s just so happened to largely coincide with China’s Cultural Revolution. People all over the world looked to what was going on in China and lifted their heads! People everywhere were inspired by this massive upsurge in China! After all, their own governments were suppressing them in their attempts to challenge the old policies and norms. To this China stood in stark contrast. In China, unlike anywhere else in the world, leading people in the society supported popular rebellion against their own state! This signified to people throughout the world that China was a very different kind of society; the kind that the restless youth of that era would want to live in and could take heart from. We should never ever distance ourselves from the principle of the Cultural Revolution!
Obviously, however, the Cultural Revolution was ultimately defeated and capitalism restored. So the question that now emerges is ‘what went wrong?’. For the duration of this article, I’m going to be arguing that the most important flaw of the Cultural Revolution was the goal Mao had set out for it: the goal of bringing China back onto the socialist road by transforming the existing state and the existing Communist Party. This will bring us around to problems that we still face today, such as the inability to adequately distinguish authentic communist tendencies from revisionist ones as well as problems of our hitherto vision of socialism itself. One thing I do want to emphasize though before continuing is that you’ll notice that the revolutionary tendency in China united not around Leninist Marxism, as far too many comrades seek to do today, but around the most advanced communist synthesis available to them: in their case, what they called Mao Zedong Thought and what we today call Maoism. We need to learn this lesson much better and apply it far more fully!
Anyhow, to begin on the record of the Cultural Revolution itself, I’ll start out by pointing out the contrast between its most important stated goal and the end result.
Mao’s famous giant poster, Bombard the Headquarters (from August 6, 1966) states: “China's first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster and Commentator's article on it in People's Daily are indeed superbly written! Comrades, please read them again. But in the last fifty days or so some leading comrades from the central down to the local levels have acted in a diametrically opposite way. Adopting the reactionary stand of the bourgeoisie, they have enforced a bourgeois dictatorship and struck down the surging movement of the great cultural revolution of the proletariat. They have stood facts on their head and juggled black and white, encircled and suppressed revolutionaries, stifled opinions differing from their own, imposed a white terror, and felt very pleased with themselves. They have puffed up the arrogance of the bourgeoisie and deflated the morale of the proletariat. How poisonous! Viewed in connection with the Right deviation in 1962 and the wrong tendency of 1964 which was 'Left' in form but Right in essence, shouldn't this make one wide awake?”
You’ll find it hard to miss that Mao viewed the downsizing of the large-scale communes as a “right deviation” at the outset. Likewise we find in the Central Committee’s famous 16 Points that came out three days later, defining the objectives of the Cultural Revolution, the following description: “At present, our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic "authorities" and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.” Here we find the goal clearly defined: the consolidation of socialism, which was, as we’ll recall, what was attempted in the Great Leap Forward. The radical transformation of all the “parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base” was premised on the objective of facilitating “the consolidation and development of the socialist system”. The fact that this consolidation of socialism never occurred even after the party was reconstituted under Mao’s leadership then should strike us as highly significant! I point this out because woefully few comrades even discuss this matter! But what led to this contrast between the central objective on the one hand and the outcome on the other? Let’s start with what I view as the most important event of the Cultural Revolution.
Throughout the latter part of 1966, a rising tide of radicalism, initiated by the local Red Guards and spread to the local factories, was increasingly sweeping Shanghai. A large number of worker-based groups were formed in the process. In early November, many of these groups banded together to form the Headquarters of the Revolutionary Revolt of Shanghai Workers led by Wang Hongwen. On January 3rd, Lin Biao and Jiang Qing, employing the local media and cadres, initiated the January Storm against the municipal government of Shanghai. Two days later, the Shanghai Workers’ Headquarters called for a general uprising against the city government, and the following day over a million people rose up and overthrew it. Over the course of the following month, members of the Cultural Revolution Group (namely Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan) led a revolutionary reorganization of the city political structure through which the masses established the Shanghai People’s Commune on February 5th. In many respects, this was the height of the Cultural Revolution. The Shanghai People’s Commune was loosely modeled on the Paris Commune, featuring the self-government of producers as the most defining element. However, it also featured a higher degree of specifically communist leadership (e.g. some general direction provided by Zhang) than had the Paris Commune. This contrasting feature is something that I think should be understood as decisive in terms of the model’s basic sustainability. Unlike the Paris Commune of old, there is no evidence to suggest that the Shanghai People’s Commune could not have survived indefinitely. Unfortunately however, more conservative leaders of the Cultural Revolution, including Mao himself, ceased to think so. Though Mao had initially supported both the January Storm and commune-style reorganization, he came to oppose the commune approach to municipal reorganization based on standard arguments about the short life span of the Paris Commune, calling instead for the Commune to be replaced with a Revolutionary Committee: a triple-alliance of local workers, cadres, and elements of the People’s Liberation Army. Whereas Mao enjoyed great prestige at the time among the revolutionaries, his opinion weighed heavily and the revolutionary committee model was implemented just 19 days after the establishment of the People’s Commune in Shanghai. I’ve focused in on this particular development because I think it showcases a very real and more potent approach to the Cultural Revolution that could have come forward, but was instead rejected. This was a crucial error! The Shanghai People’s Commune could have and should have become an approximate model for emulation nationwide and the Red Guards systematically dispatched to organize revolutionary headquarters of producers throughout the country on a locale-by-locale basis to prepare the ground for a whole China-wide wave of popular power seizures. The communes individually thereby established might then have organized a new people’s army with which to liberate China as a whole and replace its old state and party institutions with a new state based approximately on this Shanghai People’s Commune model and a new communist party born out of the Cultural Revolution Group. Indeed, once again, Mao himself had originally favored the commune model, but was dissuaded by the more conservative revolutionary committees that were also established in January and February of 1967 in Shanxi province and in Harbin, wherein the PLA soldiers had assisted the local revolutionaries in seizing power.
Another important 1967 development that’s worth highlighting specifically is the Wuhan Incident, wherein, following an attempt by the local revolutionary people in the Wuhan Workers’ Headquarters to seize power, divisional commander General Chen Zaidao and the “Million Heroes” reactionaries on his side conducted a siege against them. Zhou Enlai issued an order from Beijing for Chen to lift the siege, which was ignored. Subsequently, two members of the Cultural Revolution Group, Xie Fuzhi and Wang Li, were dispatched to Wuhan and on July 16th ordered the general to switch from supporting the Million Heroes to supporting the Workers’ Headquarters. Chen’s response was to have his army division kidnap both Xie and Wang on the 20th. A mass demonstration erupted in protest of the general’s actions. Zhou Enlai now opted to personally fly to Wuhan to resolve the incident. At General Chen’s direction, however, tanks and other military units surrounded the local airstrip and prevented his plane from landing. At that point, it had become clear that peaceful negotiation was impossible. On July 22nd, Jiang Qing advised the Red Guards to replace the army if necessary. The incident itself was only resolved when Beijing sent in three infantry divisions, several navy gunboats, and an air unit to intercept Chen’s forces, forcing him to surrender and freeing Xie and Wang. This incident was a concentration of the increasingly prevailing attitude of hostility toward the Cultural Revolution in the PLA amongst the generals. Major opposition to the Cultural Revolution from high profile military figures indeed had been voiced early on therein. Accordingly, Lin Biao and Jiang Qing had called on the Red Guards to spread revolutionary struggle to the army and transform it in that way. The Wuhan Incident marked the onset in earnest of increasing armed resistance to this on the army’s part. Hence it was very appropriate and advanced that Jiang Qing had called, in the midst of this situation, for the army’s replacement where needed. But again, this really lacked the proper form required to be victorious. The PLA was still mistakenly being viewed by the revolutionary leadership as being simply in need of reform through struggle, not of comprehensive and permanent replacement by a new people’s army. This was an important opportunity to learn how thoroughly non-reformable the existing state, including its armed bodies, really were that was at least largely missed. But we also see that Jiang Qing had come closer than others to recognizing what was truly necessary. We should uphold that.
It’s important to highlight the Wuhan Incident because it wasn’t an isolated phenomenon, but the beginning in earnest of a whole new dynamic. From early on, the PLA had generally opposed and sought to suppress the Red Guards and the masses more broadly. Now, for the next year or so, the Cultural Revolution would in significant portion be a protracted struggle (including armed struggle) between the Red Guards and the PLA, the outcome of which would, in no small part, determine the outcome of the Cultural Revolution itself. It is no exaggeration to say that the army became the main enemy of the Red Guard movement and of the Cultural Revolution Group itself and persistently remained the state body least affected by the Cultural Revolution. September of 1967 was a decisive moment, when Mao ordered the arrest of the “May 16th Corps” of the Cultural Revolution Group, including Wang Li, hero of the Wuhan Incident and original formulator of “continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Wang’s “May 16th Corps” had been a key, informal, and leading body within the Cultural Revolution Group that promoted the struggles of the Red Guards against the army and advocated power seizures from below. This was part and parcel to orders at the same time for the PLA to ‘restore order’ in China. Nearly all of the Group’s members would be arrested by the end of the Cultural Revolution. But specifically with this initial act purging the Group of its leading revolutionary element and ordering the army to ‘restore order’, the Group itself became almost immediately, for most practical purposes, defunct and power seizures rapidly ceased to take place essentially from below. By November, the Cultural Revolution Group had been ordered to stop publishing its journal, Red Flag. What all this signified, among other things, was Mao’s decisive shift to the right, now mostly supporting the army against the Red Guards. From this point forward, the authentic revolutionaries were mostly on the defensive.
The ensuing year was characterized by the PLA taking the lead in the Cultural Revolution, conducting power seizures nationwide. This leads us to the character of the revolutionary committees. The majority of revolutionary committees created rapidly came to be dominated by the army due to the fact that the army had military force at its disposal to enforce its will. For example, in the leadership of the revolutionary committee in Shanghai, 7 out of the 13 members were army officers. 20 out of 29 provincial revolutionary committees were chaired PLA officers, and in several provinces PLA soldiers chaired up to 98% of revolutionary committees above the county level. More often than not, in the interests of stability and order, the army allied with cadres on the committees against the more radical organizations of the masses. At the end of September 1968, only revolutionary committees in Shaanxi and Hubei provinces were chaired by civilians. Furthermore, the majority of those that sat on the revolutionary committees as representatives of the people were those who had had a stake in the pre-Cultural Revolution order of things rather than radicals from the movement itself.
All this marked a decisive abandonment of mass-based methodology. The more the army took the lead, the more the Red Guards were suppressed and punished. On July 27th, 1968, the Red Guards’ authority over the PLA was officially ended with Mao’s full support. In December, Mao initiated the Down to the Countryside “Movement” wherein “young intellectuals” (namely Red Guards) were subjected to a type of labor reform. They were moved for the cities to the countryside, where they would cause less social disruption.
Then came the border clashes with the Soviet Union in March of the following year. By April 1st, the Chinese Communist Party had been reconstituted under Mao’s (now-revisionist) leadership. The main purpose for the party’s re-constitution was the establishment of a new foreign policy. Even before April 1st, Mao had already turned to the likes of Chen Yi and Deng Xiaoping for the development thereof. The Red Guards were disbanded formally by the summer. The party now effectively regained its direct hand over the army and thus effectively gained control of two elements of the triple alliances that formed the revolutionary committees: the cadres and the army. Thus these committees progressively became less and less revolutionary as the leading revolutionaries in the party were gradually purged. And the next two years did indeed see the purging of the main revolutionary leaders in the party, including the former Cultural Revolution Group leader Chen Boda and hitherto second-man-in-command Lin Biao.
Let’s discuss Lin Biao for a moment. Lin Biao had initially opposed reconstituting the party, though he did participate in it after the fact. What we see with him over the next two years or so from 1969 to 1971 is his increasing conviction that his original position on that was correct and that Mao himself was on the wrong road. For example, Lin opposed punishing the Red Guards with the Down to the Countryside draft and had maintained calls for a “Flying Leap” consolidation of socialism, i.e. the reinstatement of the large-scale communes. When he was purged and, in the summer of ‘71, saw Mao attempting to initiate rapprochement with the United States, small forces in the PLA supportive of him (out of the relative few that weren’t already revisionist and supportive of the rapprochement, that is) swung into action, laying out plans for and carrying out a series of coup attempts apparently aimed at killing Mao and closing down the CCP. Wrong methodology aside, the main point here is that Lin came fairly close to recognizing the situation for what it was and this was the core motivation behind the coup attempts. These efforts, if fully successful, would have likely, in the immediate term, restored the pre-December-1968 status quo plus the large-scale communes, which by that point would have been a qualitative improvement in the objective situation. Lin’s forces were among the few who had come to realize that Mao himself was now a revisionist and that’s the main thing I want to highlight about them. It was principally Lin Biao who had synthesized the concept of Maoism in the first place. Thus with the emergence of this divide between him and Mao himself, we come to see that two basic types of Maoism had clearly emerged: a left wing Maoism and a right wing Maoism. This is why I tentatively call myself a left wing Maoist: I want to at least partially identify with varying trends that were leading elements in the Cultural Revolution which Mao himself eventually moved to the right of.
The ensuing years consisted of clear moves supporting U.S. hegemony around the globe. I don’t think I even need to elaborate on this subject at great length, so I won’t, but to at least passingly mention a particularly egregious example that comes to mind, we can obviously see this motivation behind China’s support for the U.S.-sponsored military dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile from 1973. From the disbanding of the Red Guards, there was no remaining independent revolutionary, communist force in China that we know of. All the remaining leading revolutionary elements instead were in the state itself, and generally in more secondary positions therein after 1971. Their leading elements were concentrated in what is often referred to as a “gang”, eventually known as the “gang of four”, consisting mainly of former Cultural Revolution Group members. The main concern of this group after ‘71 was Zhou Enlai’s powerful influence on policy. He had always been more a skillful diplomat than a serious communist revolutionary (even as a member of the CRG) and now used his power as premier and in the Communist Party to re-enter China into the Cold War and to bring open revisionists like Deng Xiaoping back into the Politburo of the CP. To that end, Jiang Qing’s ridiculous campaign against Lin Biao in ‘73-74 was really directed at Zhou, as if to suggest that he and the (somewhat wrongly) disgraced Lin had something in common: apparently, they were both adherents of Confucianism. The bizarre nature of this campaign was, above all else, an expression of Jiang’s sentimental unwillingness to break politically with her husband, despite his obvious right wing turn. This quite apparent inconsistency weakened the impact of her message. When Zhou died in early 1976, Deng attempted to capitalize on sympathy for him to build a movement to unseat Mao, for which of course he was removed from power. But after Mao himself died later that same year, there was confusion as to who might fill the vacuum of leadership at that point. Without Mao there to influence her choice of actions, Jiang quickly turned to the building of people’s militias for the purpose of leading the masses in seizing power from the reactionary elements. This was more the correct approach to the situation than Lin’s had been. But by that time it was really too late. The revisionist elements in the party and in the state were overwhelmingly dominant and they quickly conducted a power seizure of their own wherein hundreds died and thousands were arrested, including all members of the “gang of four”. This marked the definitive end of socialism in China.
This by no means indicates that the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969) accomplished nothing. To name some of the specific accomplishments of the Cultural Revolution...
-Far from undermining the already-backward school system, as per the common Western myth, the Cultural Revolution instead greatly increased the access of the people thereto precisely by challenging the old authorities thereof and the elitist practices that remained therein. We see that, as a result, during the period immediately following the Cultural Revolution, enrollment in all levels of schooling greatly increased. In the case of secondary education, enrollment nearly quadrupled! And youth of any background for the first time in Chinese history were enabled to apply for a college education. (Previously, university admittance relied on Confucian practices, like being screened through a series of competitive entrance exams for entrance to a hierarchy of increasingly selective prep schools, to more or less minimize the number of entrants and maintain schooling as something reserved for ‘special people’ and as a way to “get ahead” of others.) By 1973, 90% of school-aged children were enrolled in school. Among many other things, the literacy rate greatly increased as a direct result.
-Health care was successfully brought to the countryside for the first time. The feat was accomplished by way of a nationwide “barefoot doctors” program introduced as part of the Cultural Revolution. This program systematically trained both peasant youth and urban youth in basic medical practices and knowledge (both traditional and Western) and sent them out to the countryside to set up medical facilities and provide preventative care and basic treatments for free or at a very low cost (on average, $1 or $2 a year) to the vast peasantry. Even the World Health Organization acknowledges that the barefoot doctors program was a “successful example of solving shortages of medical services in rural areas”. After the program was abolished in 1981, the population percentage covered by the medical system fell off dramatically: from 90% to less than 5% in just 3 years. No program of comparable effectiveness has yet replaced it.
-The level of artistic and cultural expression greatly improved. The Cultural Revolution Group, especially under Jiang Qing’s direction, introduced a broad range of model revolutionary works of art and often tours of the country were undertaken to show them as broadly as possible. Previous to this time, artistic expression in China was usually comparatively primitive and typically still revolved around feudal themes like tales of emperors and concubines. Now, with these advanced model works inspiring the masses, there was a veritable explosion of both involvement in the arts and of artistic creativity! The brilliant and beautiful model works were often world-class works of art by the standards of the time, combining traditional Chinese forms with Western instruments and techniques. And the themes conveyed therein put the masses, their lives, and their role in society and history front and center. All this inspired the people, including peasants and working class people, to take up art, including music, dance, poetry, painting, short stories, and even film, in much larger numbers. Cultural troupes and film units multiplied in the countryside. To suggest the impact of this in terms of the working masses getting into cultural life, when over the early ‘70s Beijing held 4 national fine arts exhibits (attracting a record audience of 7.8 million), 65% of the works therein were created by amateurs! This was an expression of the explosion of artistic interest and creativity that swept the country as a result of the changes of the Cultural Revolution!
-As still another way in which the oppressive division of labor was broken down during and as a result of the Cultural Revolution, “open-door research” in the natural sciences was introduced. As in the doors of laboratories were literally swung open to the involvement of workers, universities set up extensions of labs in factories and neighborhoods, and research institutes were spread to the countryside and involved peasants. As Raymond Lotta has noted vis-a-vis the latter, “Peasants, alongside specialists from the cities, carried out experiments in hybrid grains, conducted studies of insect-life cycles, and other aspects of science in agriculture. This helped the masses come to understand scientific questions and the scientific method; and helped scientists gain a better sense of conditions in society, including in the countryside.” Popular primers helped make scientific knowledge much more widely available and accessible.
-And yes, economic management did become more equitable. One-man management schemes were broken down into new “3-in-1 combinations” of workers, professional technicians, and Communist Party personnel to oversee the day-to-day management of workplaces. This meant that workers (a tiny few anyway) spent time doing managerial work and professional managers (a tiny few anyway) spent time on the floor actually doing productive work for a change. The “3-in-1 combinations” weren’t really that much of a change, but they did impact the way workplace decisions were made in a way that was more favorable to the views of actual workers.
Neither was the ‘casualty toll’ of the Cultural Revolution anywhere near as high as the commonly-circulated “estimates” we see courtesy of The Black Book of Communism. In one YouTube video that clearly gets its info from this source, we find it estimated, for example, that the Cultural Revolution killed 30 million people. Even the Chinese government, which arrests people for promoting the Cultural Revolution, estimates that a total of “34,274” people died as a result of the Cultural Revolution’s course. This is barely 0.1% of the total conveyed in the YouTube video as a fact! For a full-fledged revolution taking place on such a scale (China having been, of course, the world’s most populous nation), that’s a pretty damn small death toll, in fact! Let’s dare to compare this with the American Civil War, for example...
-In the American Civil War, 600,000 people out of 28 million died.
-In China’s Cultural Revolution, less than 35,000 out of 600 million died.
...just to put that in perspective and yeah to kinda say “look whose preaching”. Moreover, the 30 million statistic is literally impossible. That would imply that about 5% of the population was wiped out in the course of 3 years. Were anything remotely like that the case, it would have registered in the overall life expectancy of the population. Instead, in no small part as a result of the barefoot doctors program introduced as part of the Cultural Revolution, life expectancy in China rapidly increased throughout this period. Average Chinese life expectancy under Mao indeed roughly doubled from 32 years to 65 years. So yeah, seriously, we need to be capable of greater critical thinking than that which is promoted by The Black Book of Communism and we need to insist on greater critical thinking than that among the people. If anything, the Cultural Revolution was far too tame, not far too violent! No more than 3% of the CP cadre were even expelled in the course of the events in question. That’s hardly what you might call a draconian purge or a lapse into chaos. Claims to either effect are total bullshit and should not be accepted!
Yes, there were excesses during the Cultural Revolution, just as there are inevitably in any revolution. But my point is that, if you take a look at the positions of the pro-Mao parties out there in the world today, you’ll find that practically all of them (including the RCP) basically blame the Red Guards, Jiang Qing, and Lin Biao for the victory of the revisionists. Take another listen to that interview with Bob Avakian I highlighted earlier for a fairly typical example. When one looks to the various pro-Mao parties out there for an assessment of the Cultural Revolution, one finds that dogmatism and liberalism are (dogmatically!) assessed to have been the main problems. In truth, the main problem was revisionism, as the left wing Maoists consistently identified.
To begin wrapping this all up on the Cultural Revolution, let’s, while recognizing the real achievements of the Cultural Revolution and rejecting the lies and slanders about it, come back again to the contrast between the main objective and the outcome. Momentum toward the Cultural Revolution began building up in 1962 with the launching of the socialist education movement in protest of the downsizing of the large-scale agricultural communes. The principle purpose of the Cultural Revolution again hence had been the reversal of that verdict. The restructuring of the education system and other achievements of the Cultural Revolution were not originally viewed as ends in themselves, but as the means by which to reverse the verdict to which I’ve just spoken. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution with a radical new vision of socialism based on people’s communes in mind. He aimed get a commune-based system of socialism established nationwide, both in the rural and urban areas. But when the first revolutionary committees came along, Mao jettisoned this radical new vision for a much more conservative one based on those committees. The more this happened...the more the emphasis on the leading role of the army and of the party increased...the more divorced both the new vision of socialism itself and the methodology of its achievement became from the masses. The revolutionary committees quickly became just another variant of the old Soviet-style, party-state approach and they tended in the precise same direction: the restoration of capitalism. This shows them to have been fundamentally structurally flawed.
Commune-based socialism has surfaced time and again throughout modern history and usually more or less spontaneously: in France, in Hungary, in China, and elsewhere. This strikes me as more than coincidental. The whole point of Mao’s 1958 break with the Soviet party-state approach to socialism was to establish a much more mass-based kind. Mao had viewed the party-state type as too divorced from the masses; too elitist, really. The Great Leap Forward launched in that same year marked the birth of commune-based socialism as a Leninist system. More than anything else, this is what separated Maoism from all other schools of Marxism. Maoism was thus developed by Mao in this way and subsequently synthesized by a host of others on the left wing of the CCP (most importantly by Lin Biao though, and generally during and as part of the socialist education movement). In a basic way, it was then systemized and applied in the form of the upsurge of the Cultural Revolution before being increasingly jettisoned by Mao himself. In this sense, Maoism was a leading factor in China from 1958 to early 1967, after which point people other than Mao and of lesser prestige became its principle advocates. In describing myself as a left wing Maoist, I’m defining myself as one who upholds a modification of the commune-based system of socialism that originally defined Maoism rather than the party-state type of system that’s upheld by those who more or less uncritically uphold every historical twist and turn in Mao’s views. Left wing Maoism has continued to exist in varying forms since the time of Mao; it has never died out. This, however, represents the first comprehensive synthesis of it as such (to my knowledge anyway); as something distinct from the right wing forms of Maoism that have prevailed since early ‘67 and down to the present. Left wing Maoism most essentially means commune-based socialism with the communist vanguard party leading the way. That’s what I’m proposing.
I also think it easily noticed at this point that there was clearly a certain failure on Mao’s part to adequately identify who was the enemy and likewise to apply the corresponding solution. Mao recognized that the enemy continually appears in the party, even under socialism, but neglected to tolerate the organization of factions. My point on that is that factions are inevitable. We can recognize them or try to suppress them. But when we choose the mechanistic approach we lose out on both our ability to distinguish revisionists and on the sort of open debate that brings forward the truth of things more fully, which we absolutely need to develop a correct communist synthesis at any given point. There are also other basic structural flaws to traditional (i.e. Stalin-inspired) forms of democratic centralism that I think it would be more important to debate in a different context.
What we need in an overall sense today is a more advanced synthesis of left wing Maoism. But first we have to recognize the essential correctness of left wing Maoism. That’s my argument.
As a concluding note, again I think it no coincidence that the rebellious movements of the 1960s climaxed amidst China’s Cultural Revolution (again, 1966-1969) and then increasingly fell apart after that point. Although this global upheaval was inspired by a lot of things, the Cultural Revolution was definitely a major factor. It is likewise no coincidence that nothing like the tone of this time has been replicated on the same scale since then. The Cultural Revolution was the most advanced expression of revolutionary politics that has ever come forward in the history of the world. To advance in a renewed way toward the goal of world revolution and the establishment of communism worldwide, we must consult and deeply reassess the events in China from this particular time. That’s what I’ve attempted to do here. I hope you’ll help me continue this effort by providing your thoughts on all this.