Mao’s Cultural Revolution Pt. 1: Seeding Machine for Revolution

Is revolution possible? How can the people deepen revolutionary change after seizing power? To answer those questions, it is valuable to study Mao’s revolution in China, and especially the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Kasama would like to share “Evaluating the Cultural Revolution in China and its Legacy for the Future.” It was written by the  by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group in the U.S. This comprehensive paper describes the course of the Cultural Revolution (CR) from 1966-1976, its achievements and shortcomings, and why future movements for revolution, socialism and communism must stand on its shoulders.”

This is the first of 8 articles composing a paper that was written by the MLM Revolutionary Study group.

Evaluating the Cultural Revolution (Part 1): Intro

by MLMRSG

This installment includes sections on how the CR affected the revolutionary movement in the U.S., some questions raised by the CR, and the relationship of the Great Leap Forward and the Socialist Education Movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s to the initiation of the CR in 1966.

How the Cultural Revolution Affected the Revolutionary Movement in U.S.

Even before the Cultural Revolution was launched in the mid-1960s, many in the U.S. were surprised and inspired by the example of the people of the world’s most populous country successfully driving out the Japanese invaders and the U.S.-backed regime of Jiang Kai-shek. In the anti-war and Black liberation movements, political activists learned of the mass movement of hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants that collectivized agriculture within several years. Comparisons between the advances made by socialist China and imperialist-dominated, poverty-stricken India were common among ‘60s radicals. Moreover, students who rebelled against being trained as white collar bureaucrats and for “ugly American” roles were attracted to the Chinese concept of being “red and expert” because of this concept’s insistence that revolutionary moral and political commitments were not only compatible with developing professional expertise, but were essential to it.

In 1963, weeks before the civil rights March on Washington, the revolutionary Black nationalist Robert F. Williams was in China, where he called on Mao Zedong.

At his request, Mao issued an important internationalist statement in support of the Afro-American people’s struggle, which concluded: “The evil system of colonialism and imperialism grew on along with the enslavement of the Negroes and the trade in Negroes; it will surely come to its end with the thorough emancipation of the black people.”

In 1968, after the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mao reiterated his support, and stated that “the Afro-American struggle is not only a struggle waged by the exploited and oppressed Black people for freedom and emancipation, it is also a new clarion call to all the exploited and oppressed people of the United States…. It is a tremendous aid and inspiration to the struggle of the people throughout the world against U.S. imperialism.” Mao called on “the workers, peasants and revolutionary intellectuals of every country and all who are willing to fight against U.S. imperialism to take action and extend strong support to the struggle of the Black people of the United States!” This stance had a tremendous effect on the New Communist Movement (NCM) in the U.S.

In the early 1970s, leading members of the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords Party visited socialist China, and eventually nearly all of the groups making up the NCM sent delegations to visit the People’s Republic in the early 1970s. Leaders of the newly emerged women’s liberation movement visited China and were struck by the slogan that “women hold up half the sky,” and that one of the first laws passed by the new government banned forced marriages and gave women the right to divorce. One of the members of the early Revolutionary Union who had spent many years in China and had become a student Red Guard there, and others with personal ties to China helped bring stories from the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution back to the U.S. Delegations of intellectuals also brought back news of developments during the Cultural Revolution.
In the late 1960s and early 70s, the Panthers and the Lords sold Chinese revolutionary literature and applied many Maoist principles to their own work, including promoting revolutionary internationalism in the pages of their newspapers. In 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton raised money to buy shotguns for the Panthers’ anti-police patrols by selling Mao’s Red Books on the University of California at Berkeley campus for $1 each.

In a 1996 speech titled, “The Historical Meaning of the Cultural Revolution and its Impact on the U.S.,” historian Robert Weil explained:

Huey Newton in his book To Die For The People talks about many sources of influence on the party: Fidel, Che, Ho, the guerrillas in Angola and Mozambique. But Mao and the Cultural Revolution keep coming through as a kind of guiding or most significant influence, to the extent that, at the time of the Attica Uprising in upstate New York, they were asked by the inmates to negotiate with Rockefeller and Oswald, the head of the prisons. And they in turn called for Mao Zedong to serve as the negotiator between the inmates and the authorities, all the way from Nixon down to Oswald. [Laughter]

You know, we laugh, and we should laugh, but I think it’s important to realize how strong this influence was. And that the Panthers, in turn, became in many ways the group that introduced the concepts of Mao and the Cultural Revolution to many other parts of the movement, such as the Asian American movement.

Beyond those who were fortunate enough to go to China, beyond those who were specifically influenced in the ways I just talked about, I think that the ideas of the Cultural Revolution became almost a part of the atmosphere of what people were breathing in this country in that period.

Another of the people I talked to before I came here had a particularly good insight into that. He said, among the different influences in the sixties—and it would certainly be a mistake to reduce all of this in any way to Mao or to China—but that of all of those influences, Mao in particular, and the lessons of the Cultural Revolution in general, were the best at summarizing and universalizing and globalizing the struggles of the 1960s.

Think about all of the key ideas that came out of that period, primarily through Mao and the impact of his words: “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win,” “Overcome All Difficulties,” “Seize the Day, Seize the Hour”—which the Panthers turned into “Seize the Time”—“To Rebel is Justified,” “From the Masses, To the Masses,” “Combat Liberalism,” “The People and the People Alone are the Motive Force of World History.” These became ideas which people reoriented their entire lives around.

Questions Raised by the Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution in China was unprecedented in history. Never before had so many millions of people of all classes and social strata thought about, talked about, and struggled over how to deepen the revolutionary process in a socialist society. The struggle was often exhilarating, as indicated by the experience of two U.S. teachers in China:

When we returned to Peking…we entered a dramatic and colorful world that had become a political festival of the masses….[T]he campus was almost deserted after ten o’clock in the morning as students and teachers disappeared into their intense study sessions, organizational meetings, and perusal of Cultural Revolution editorials and documents. Everywhere on the walls of buildings, thousands of big-character posters stared out at us. We were now to live amid a sea of language, a lively world of large blue, red, and yellow ideographs…

And it was not only the students who participated in this orgy of writing and reading. Shop clerks, workers, office employees, and bus drivers somehow carried on their work while following the same basic routine as the students. It was a most impressive sight—the population of a country which only twenty years before had been 80 per cent illiterate conducting a national debate through the written word…The formidable organization of the Chinese Communist Party, built up methodically over the decades, had been suddenly overturned and replaced by a communications and organizational network which embraced millions of ordinary citizens in a decision-making apparatus of their own. In the evenings, thousands of mass meetings occurred simultaneously throughout the capital. There the latest political developments were discussed, analyzed, and acted upon.

As inspiring as the Cultural Revolution was to the people of China and to millions in other countries, its defeat and rollback in the years following Mao’s death have left many activists with some important questions.

• How is it possible for the masses of working people in a socialist country to continue the revolutionary process and defeat attempts at capitalist restoration?
• What were the obstacles faced by the Cultural Revolution? Even with its theoretical breakthroughs and many practical achievements, why was the Cultural Revolution eventually defeated?
• Were the campaigns against intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution justified? Why was there widespread, at times violent, factional struggle during these years?
• What lessons does the Cultural Revolution have for anti-imperialists and revolutionaries in the 21st century who are looking to the next wave of socialist revolutions?

The methodology we will use is to first discuss the challenges facing socialism in China, including contending forces in the Chinese Communist Party, during the Cultural Revolution and the period immediately preceding it. We examine the political line of Mao and other revolutionaries in the CCP, their goals, and the great achievements of the Cultural Revolution, particularly its most advanced experience. At the same time, we look at the “bigger picture,” including the substantial obstacles faced by the Cultural Revolution, its shortcomings, the reasons for its defeat, and new concepts of socialist society that are being considered by revolutionaries in many countries.

Prologue to the Cultural Revolution

To understand the significance of the Cultural Revolution, it is worth recalling that ever since the Communist Manifesto’s opening salvo that the specter of communism was haunting Europe, defenders and apologists for capitalism have claimed that socialism (to say nothing of communism) will never work because it goes against human nature and ignores allegedly fundamental economic laws. Moreover, they are quick to add that revolutions only lead to old exploiters and oppressors being replaced by new ones. This view was expressed in the words of “We Won’t Get Fooled Again,” a song about revolution by The Who, a British rock group in the 1960s and ‘70s: “Take a look at the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The experience of the Soviet Union provided support for that cynicism. When the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution transformed the world’s political landscape, millions of people around the world thrilled to the promise of a new world. In the famous words of a U.S. journalist who visited the Soviet Union soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, “I have seen the future, and it works.” However, by the early 1960s, you didn’t have to be an apologist for capitalism to realize that this socialist future was not working in the Soviet Union. To millions of progressive and revolutionary minded people around the world—including many in the U.S.— the Soviet Union had become an oppressive and bureaucratized caricature of what socialism was supposed to be. Among revolutionaries it was increasingly understood that state ownership in the USSR had become an empty shell, masking a new form of state capitalism presided over by a revisionist “communist” party.

What was less obvious to revolutionary minded people at that time was that the same thing was threatening to happen in China. By the early 1960s, many of the revolutionary achievements in the years immediately following the 1949 birth of the People’s Republic were being reversed, and the future of socialism was in doubt.

From 1959 to 1961, a series of events took place that put Mao and other revolutionaries in the Communist Party of China on the political defensive.

The Great Leap Forward in 1958 was an ambitious plan to increase industrial and agricultural production. It undertook radical social transformations and led to new levels of socialist consciousness. In one year, 750,000 collective farms were merged into 24,000 people’s communes, each of which was composed of dozens of villages and on average 5,000 households. The communes were not just economic units but new social organizations that combined political, educational, cultural and military functions.

The scale of the communes made it possible to mobilize large numbers of peasants to work on big irrigation, flood control and land reclamation projects. Rural industrialization leapt forward, with commune-operated shops manufacturing and repairing agricultural implements, small chemical plants producing fertilizer, and the establishment of local crop-processing industries. Tens of millions of women joined the labor force outside their homes for the first time; childcare centers were set up on the communes. The communes funded new primary schools and a network of middle schools and colleges that combined work and study.
In the industrial areas of Shanghai and the northeast, new forms of factory organization replaced the one-man management system that had been patterned after Soviet industry. The system was called the “two participations” (participation of cadres in labor and workers in management), “one reform” (reform of unneeded regulations) and “triple combinations” (of skilled workers, technicians and administrators to solve production problems). In order to train workers for new roles in their plants, a system of spare-time schools and colleges attached to factories was established. In some plants, 60 to 70 percent of the workforce was enrolled in these schools.

These were important advances. However, a combination of unrealistic production goals (e.g., doubling steel production in a year), transportation bottlenecks, wasteful “backyard” furnaces that produced low-grade steel, and the diversion of too much labor from agricultural work into other areas effectively brought the Great Leap Forward to a halt by early 1960.

Particularly in the countryside, some social transformations jumped ahead of the level of development and political consciousness at that time. Some communes were eliminating private plots for farming altogether. There was resistance among the peasants to this policy and to equalizing the income of the production teams (usually 20-30 households) throughout the communes. In addition, Party leaders saw communist society as achievable within the following decade or two. All of this was later criticized as a “communist wind.”

At a party conference in 1959, Mao took responsibility for the overly ambitious goals of the Great Leap Forward and for some of errors in how it had been implemented. He described it as a “partial failure.” But Mao and his supporters recognized the Great Leap’s achievements as well as its defects, making it possible for many of its goals, especially in such fields as factory management, education and health care, to be more effectively pursued in the Cultural Revolution a decade later.

The Great Leap Forward was followed by three years of severe drought and floods, which affected 60% of China’s agricultural land. In 1960, the Soviet Union pulled out its industrial experts, disrupting production in key industries. In addition, cadre in many areas inflated production figures (the “wind of exaggeration” as it was called), making it difficult to ship grain where it was needed most. While the natural calamities played the major role, these factors combined to create famine conditions in parts of the countryside in 1960-61.
In the wake of the Great Leap Forward, revisionists in the party, led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, seized the initiative. Liu became State Chairman in 1959. Though Mao was the Party Chairman, he was sidelined. Mao later said he was treated like a “dead ancestor” during these years.

With a revisionist political line and leaders in the ascendancy, Chinese society became increasingly stratified and bureaucratized. In 1961, the “70 Articles for Regulations in Industry” was issued, which sought to reverse the industrial transformations of the Great Leap Forward. Under it, managers used individual bonuses to appeal to workers’ and technicians’ narrow self-interest, piecework reappeared, managerial authority was strengthened, and greater emphasis on profitability was placed on the operation of enterprises.
As Liu and Deng promoted contracting collective-farmed land out to individual families, the size of the private plots worked by peasant households increased from 5% to 12% of the tillable land. The gap between the cities and countryside in the delivery of modern medical services grew. The higher education system was fostering social inequality by shutting out the children of workers and peasants. Party leaders and cadre were becoming increasing divorced from the experiences of working people and were developing into a new privileged elite. China was being pulled off the “socialist road.”

While socialism in a country like China must be understood as a form of class rule of the proletariat in alliance with the peasantry, and as a mode of production in which planned production for social needs replaces production for private profit, it is not a static social system. What defines socialism most clearly is the road on which it is traveling. Is society expanding or restricting economic, social and political inequalities to the greatest degree possible? Is it promoting mass participation and debate, or political passivity, in factories, farms, schools and governmental institutions? Is it promoting internationalism and leading mass campaigns to support revolution in other countries? Is it combating “me first” capitalist ideology with struggle for the collective interest? Is it challenging national oppression and male supremacy? And of critical importance, what political line is the working class’ political leadership in the communist party and state organs pursuing?

Mao’s responded to the rightist offensive by pushing to initiate the Socialist Education Movement in 1962. In addition, the decision of the Chinese Communist Party to open up polemics in the early 1960s against the revisionist line that had emerged in the Soviet Union spurred the Socialist Education Movement and laid important groundwork for the Cultural Revolution. These polemics, concentrated in The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement (a compilation of nine documents written under Mao’s direction in 1963-64) indirectly targeted top leaders of the CCP who were implementing similar revisionist policies.

In a September 1962 speech which set the tone for the Socialist Education Movement, Mao stressed that the class struggle would continue in China for a prolonged period of time. The Socialist Education Movement called for combining education with productive labor, rooting our corrupt cadre, and the revival of a socialist spirit among the masses and in the party. In many areas, poor and middle peasants were mobilized to reassert the primacy of collective farming over private plots. The advanced Dazhai commune was held up as a national model for agriculture. The Daqing oilfields, which had been opened up through self-sacrificing work and where the “3-1-2” system was being creatively employed, was a national model for industry.
An important focus of the Socialist Education Movement was the People’s Liberation Army. While military training continued at a high level, political consciousness and ideological education were given priority over technique. The Quotations of Chairman Mao Tsetung was first developed for use in the PLA in the early 1960s. After Peng Dehuai was removed and Lin Biao became Defense Minister in 1959, the trend towards a Soviet-style professional officer corps was reversed; officers’ ranks and privileges were eventually eliminated. PLA units worked alongside the peasants on the communes and trained a large people’s militia.
There was also sharp struggle over the question of whether China could build up its defense capacity by self-reliant effort, or whether it had to acquire advanced weaponry from the Soviet Union. In fact, socialist China was able to produce its own tanks, jets and naval vessels, and by 1964 was able to break the imperialist powers’ monopoly on nuclear weapons.

However, Mao’s initiatives in the early 1960s, with the exception of the campaign to place politics in command of the work of the PLA, were undermined at every turn by Liu, Deng and their network of revisionist officials in the party and government. In the cities, managers and administrators blocked efforts to stem the growing inequalities in the factories and educational system. In the countryside, Liu issued the “23 Directives,” using his position as State Chairman to trump Mao’s policies. Instead of mobilizing the peasants to reinvigorate collective farming and criticize conservative rural party officials, Liu and Deng dispatched “work teams”– outside cadres organized by higher party organs– to protect these officials and block independent initiatives among the peasants. Battle lines were being drawn.

Confronted with this situation, Mao’s attention turned to the revisionist policies of high-ranking party leaders. This led directly to the launch of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Its goals were to overthrow those leaders of the party whose policies were leading China backward towards capitalism, and to transform and revolutionize people’s thinking and relationships with each other. This revolution in socialist society was an attempt—unprecedented anywhere or anytime—to mobilize and empower hundreds of millions of workers, peasants, youth, women and minority nationalities in order to stay on the long and difficult socialist road to communism.

Mao’s understanding of the necessity for class struggle in socialist society and his leadership of the Cultural Revolution constitute his most important contribution to the world revolutionary movement. Revolutionary movements and future socialist societies will have to address these questions if they are to realize their promise.

Notes:

1 Robert F. Williams (1925-1996) was a pioneer of the modern Black Liberation Movement and its de facto international ambassador. As president of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP in the late 1950s, he came under sharp attack from the Ku Klux Klan, local police and other reactionaries. When he urged the local Black community to take up arms in self-defense, he faced death threats and false charges from local and state police—and he and his family went into exile from 1961 to 1969. In Cuba, he continued his activism with a newspaper, The Crusader, and a radio program broadcast throughout the South, Radio Free Dixie. He then came under criticism and attack from both Communist Party USA members in Cuba and some Cuban Communists for his Black Nationalism, which they claimed was splitting the American working class. “There could be no separate black revolt in the United States, the head of Cuban security told Williams, because white workers must be the primary revolutionary force due to their numbers.” (Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, p. 296). Williams then left Cuba for Vietnam, where he met with Ho Chi Minh, and traveled to China, where he was welcomed by Mao Zedong.

2 Oppose Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism, August 8, 1963. http://www.marxists.org

3 Based on Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, the RU was formed in the San Francisco-Bay Area in 1968. It grew into a national organization and became the Revolutionary Communist Party USA in 1975.

4 See, e.g, William Hinton’s Turning Point in China, 1972; Ruth and Victor Sidel’s Women and Child Care in China, 1973, and China! Inside the People’s Republic, by the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, 1972.

5 This included three Chinese-American groups Wei Min She (in San Francisco, which was influenced by the RU/RCP), I Wor Kuen (in SF and NYC, which later co-founded the League for Revolutionary Struggle), and the Asian Study Group (in NYC, which went on to form the Workers Viewpoint Organization/Communist Workers Party).

6 See www.chinastudygroup.org under ‘articles.’

7 Nancy and David Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside: Years in Revolutionary China—1964-1969, 1976, p. 148. The authors taught at the Beijing First Foreign Languages Institute. The title of their book is taken from a favorite Chinese saying of Mao, “The tree may prefer calm, but the wind will not subside.” On the role of dazibaos in the Chinese Revolution, see Goran Leijonhufvad, Going Against the Tide: On Dissent and Big Character Posters in China, 1990.

8 In the mid-1950s, Mao used his trademark language to describe officials who thought that everything Soviet should be copied, “Some people say that no matter what, even the farts of the Russians smell good; that too is subjectivism. Even the Russians themselves would admit that they stink!” Lee Feigon, Mao: A Reinterpretation, 2002, p. 112.

9 The tern revisionist is applied to people who or organizations which see themselves as upholding Marxist principles and/or creatively adapting them, but in fact put forward an ideology and position that guts Marxism of its revolutionary essence.

In a capitalist society, a revisionist political line (1) makes reforms ends in themselves rather than connecting the people’s resistance and struggle for reforms to a revolutionary rupture with existing property and political relations and (2) denies—often based on wishful thinking—the ferocity with which the ruling class(es) will try to retain state power. More generally revisionism denies that the state is an instrument of class rule. This leads to the view that a peaceful transition to socialism is possible and that durable international peace is possible in this, the era of imperialism.

In a socialist society, a revisionist political line (1) asserts that the primary task of socialism is economic development, promotes material incentives and political passivity, and negates the decisive role that consciousness and ideology play in enabling the working class to more directly determine the overall direction of society, (2) serve to defend and widen inequalities in wealth, education, and access to information and decision making power that continue to exist in socialist society, and (3) obscures the existence of classes in socialist society; the material bases for these classes; and the intensity, character and long-term nature of the class struggle necessary to advance along the socialist road to classless society, communism.

10 Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After, 3rd Edition, 1999, pp. 220-227. Meisner’s book provides an overview and useful data from the Maoist era, but it has major flaws. Meisner considers China in the Maoist era to have been a non-socialist “bureaucratic state,’ and opposes the leading role of a Communist Party. While he describes and supports many of the social transformations of the Cultural Revolution, he considers it to have been a failure.

11 As a result, the basic unit of accounting that determined the distribution of income was reduced from the level of the commune to that of the production team.

12 Stuart Schram, Chairman Mao Talks to the People, Talks and Letters: 1956-1971, 1974,
p. 146. This is an invaluable compilation of many previously unpublished works by Mao.

13 Meisner, p. 235.

14 “Cadre” is a term applied to both full-time party members and government officials.

15 Joseph Ball, an expert in demography, has recently analysed several well publicized studies which are based on comparisons of census figures before and after the famine years. Ball demonstrates that these censuses were unreliable, and were only released in the 1980s, when the new regime was engaged in a repudiation of China’s socialist achievements between 1956 and 1976.

(www.monthlyreview.org/0906ball.htm) Mobo Gao argues that the 1953 census is grossly inflated. It claimed that China’s population had risen from 450 million in 1947 to 600 million in 1953, which includes the years of civil war between the CCP and the Guomindang. This, by itself, could explain the “missing” tens of millions of people between the 1953 census and the post-famine census. Gao Village: Rural Life in Modern China, 1999, pp. 127-128.

In his last book, Through a Looking Glass Darkly, U.S. Views of the Chinese Revolution, 2006, William Hinton interviewed villagers from several different provinces who lived through these “three bad years.” They reported short rations, but no deaths due to starvation. Hinton argues persuasively that “a famine exists in a peasant country when people give up trying to survive at home, abandon their land and move out en masse….When you have land abandonment, with millions of people taking to the road and heading toward regions where they hope to find food, such vast migrations are very hard to conceal.” His conclusion is that there was real hunger and even starvation in some localities, but reports of tens of millions of death are not credible. (See Chapter 9 of his book, The State and the “Great Famine.”)

Moreover, the death total over three years of drought and floods would have been many times higher in pre-liberation China. The collectivization of agriculture and the construction of infrastructure such as dams and irrigation systems in the 1950s gave peasants new protection against natural calamities. Measured against India and Indonesia, mainly peasant countries which did not go through revolutionary transformations, the Chinese people made enormous gains in life expectancy and overall health and wellbeing during the socialist period.

16 http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/PGLtc.html

17 Due to rightist opposition, the campaigns to Learn from Dazhai and Daqing could not be fully realized until the Cultural Revolution got underway.

18 In 1965, the Chief of Staff of the PLA, Luo Ruiqing, was replaced due to his insistence that a modern army could not be built without aid from the Soviet revisionists.