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Cultural Revolution in China and Its Legacy for the Future

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Cultural Revolution in China and Its Legacy for the Future Evaluating the Cultural Revolution in China and its Legacy for the Future By the MLM Revolutionary Study Group in the U.S. (March 2007) "AT THE MEETING OF A MASS PLEDGE" The big-character poster reads "A Letter of Pledge." The banner above reads "promote production by making revolution." Workers' Art Group, Shanghai Steel Factory No. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS A. How the Cultural Revolution Affected the Revolutionary Movement in the U.S. 3 B. Some Questions Raised by the Cultural Revolution 5 C. Prologue to the Cultural Revolution 7 D. The Course of the Cultural Revolution 12 E. Theoretical Underpinnings of the Cultural Revolution 20 F. Achievements of the Cultural Revolution 24 (1) Revolution in the Superstructure of Socialist Society 24 • Revolutionary Culture 25 • Education: “Red and Expert” 28 • Collective Values and internationalism 34 (2) The Liberation of Women 36 (3) Narrowing and Overcoming Class Differences and Inequalities 44 • Workers Transform Their Factorie s 45 • Peasant Empowerment and Learning from Dazhai 48 • Health Care and “Barefoot Doctors” 50 G. The Obstacles that the Cultural Revolution Faced, and its Shortcomings 52 H. Conceptualizing Socialist Society 64 (1) Some Important Understandings of the Nature of Socialist Society 64 (2) The Role of Mass Organizations 66 (3) Dissent and Mass Debate 67 (4) The Hundred Flowers and Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1956-57 68 (5) The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) on Multi-Party Competition 73 (6) The Communist Party of India (Maoist) on Socialist Society 75 (7) Summing Up 76 Conclusion 79 Selected Bibliography 82 2 Note: This paper is meant to be read in conjunction with a paper presented to a conference held in Hong Kong in June 2006 on the 40th Anniversary of the Cultural Revolution. This paper is titled “Chinese Foreign Policy During the Maoist Era and its Lessons for Today”— by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group. Please write to [email protected] for a copy. A. How the Cultural Revolution Affected the Revolutionary Movement in the 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. Williams1 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.‖ 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. 3 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!‖ 2 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 Union3 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.4 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] 2 “Oppose Racial Discrimination by U.S. Imperialism, August 8, 1963. 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. 4 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.5 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.6 B.
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