Lessons from the Cultural Revolution
Understanding one of the Communist movement's most important experiments
The Cultural Revolution undertaken from 1966 to 1976 stands out as one of the paramount developments in Communist practice - often maligned as a chaotic mess of mob rule in the West and condemned by the People’s Republic of China as a shameful deviation from practical politics on the part of Mao Zedong, a more in-depth examination reveals that the Cultural Revolution was one of the most important experiments in the history of communism, marked by a number of successes in the political and socio-economic spheres. Even as an incomplete revolution, the particular successes of the decade-long program as well as the nature of its undoing provide vital lessons for Marxist and revolutionary political movements. For the research on this essay, I have drawn on a number of sources, including The Unknown Cultural Revolution by Dongping Han, The Battle for China’s Past by Gao Mobo, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture by Alessandro Russo, The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction by Richard Kraus, and Mao’s China and After by Maurice Meisner, in order to compose contextualize and examine the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” and what it can reveal for contemporary aspiring revolutionaries.
Understanding the context of the Cultural Revolution requires addressing one of the most significant failures under Mao’s leadership of the Communist Party of China, the Great Leap Forward. Initiated in 1958, the intent of the ambitious program was not just the rapid collectivization of agriculture but a transformation of Chinese society as a whole in the advance towards communism. This was intended to be achieved by bringing together the many agricultural cooperatives which had been formed during the first decade of the People’s Republic into larger “people’s communes.” In tandem with this, the Great Leap entailed the project of resolving what Marx had described as the “the antagonism between town and country” through the rapid development of rural infrastructure and the proletarianization of the peasantry by involving them in industrial work. It is worth noting that in the course of the Great Leap Forward, a number of successes were initially realized, including the doubling of the number of rural primary schools, the construction of vital and expansive irrigation projects that would serve the country for decades to come, and establishing a number of rural industrial enterprises that made peasant collectives more self-sufficient and less reliant on urban trade.
The program was ambitious, likely overly so, and ultimately on the whole a failure, leading to the excess deaths of around 15 to 23 million out of the 660 million population from malnutrition and disease during what were known as the Three Years of Famine. These excess deaths were the result of multiple factors, including the sudden focus on infrastructural and industrial development at the expense of agricultural output, unfavorable weather conditions which created intense flooding that in turn necessitated further emphasis on infrastructural development, the withdrawal of Soviet technical advisors sent by Khruschev due to the Soviet Union’s growing displeasure with Chinese criticisms of revisionism, and misunderstandings of environmental impacts of deep plowing and pest extermination. One of the most important factors however would be the decentralized nature of the project, where local officials reported back their agricultural outputs to the central government with little to no accountability or input from the communes and tended to exaggerate in order to fulfill quotas and satisfy their own interests. This last issue would be a key factor in shaping how the project of collectivization was addressed during the Cultural Revolution.
Acknowledging the decisive policy failure of the Great Leap Forward, it is also useful to consider the broader context of its consequences. Over the time period from 1949 to 1979, the three decades between the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the beginning of economic liberalization of China, the grim years around the Three Years of Famine between 1959 and 1961 stand out as anomalous compared to the rest of the period, in which a robust safety net successfully ensured food security and saw an otherwise uninterrupted rise in life expectancy. Liberal economists like Amartya Sen acknowledge that even considering the Three Years of Famine, over the course of the thirty year period from 1949 to 1979, a comparable country like India, which had a slightly smaller population, suffered the same total number of deaths from malnutrition every eight years as China experienced over the entire three decade period altogether. The policy reaction to the Great Leap Forward under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqui would prove to be a significant overcorrection of the program’s failures that discarded most of its positive achievements: the availability of rural primary schooling decreased, the rural enterprises were shut down and dissolved regardless of their success, along with the improved social services which collectivization provided.
In light of the failures of the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong was subject to both criticism and engaged in self-criticism, moving to a marginal, semi-retired position in the Communisty Party, holding the mostly honorary title of Party chairman. However, he retained considerable political influence, which he would successfully leverage in the later half of the 1960’s to initiate the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a mass mobilization campaign that emphasized the advancement of the communist project in every sphere, and in many respects succeeded in achieving the goals which the Great Leap Forward had failed to realize. In 1966, Mao would use his position as an elder statesman and Chairman of the Communist Party to issue the Sixteen Points that would guide the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Sixteen Points emphasized how the victory of the Communist Party did not mean the end of class conflict within China, but its continuation on a new front in which the proletariat, the proletarianized peasantry and soldiers, and revolutionary elements within the intelligentsia and party needed to mobilize in order to defend and advance the communist project, in opposition to the bureaucratic and intellectual elements in the Communist Party that sought to shift to the “capitalist road” and abandon the communist project in all but name. This would be achieved by these revolutionary classes creating mass organizations that would encourage involvement in combating reversion to the “capitalist road” and bridging the gap that Mao perceived between the Party and the masses.
The initial stage of the Cultural Revolution, and the image which comes to mind for many of those familiar with the concept when they hear the phrase, was the mobilization of the Red Guards. Teenage and young adult students were among the first to mobilize around the Sixteen Points by forming their own enthusiastic militant student organizations that subjected party officials and intellectuals to ruthless criticism, a process which mass organizations of workers and peasants quickly joined in on. Political involvement and speech was encouraged and facilitated among people who were previously disengaged. Contrary to many lurid Western accounts, most of the Red Guards refrained from violence, however some Red Guards beat officials and intellectuals as part of their “criticism” sessions and even engaged in street fights with rival Red Guards. This violence, while uncommon, would become significant enough that it needed to be reined in by the People’s Liberation Army as the Cultural Revolution moved into a new phase - this conflict between. Beginning in 1967, there was a shift in the approach to the Cultural Revolution intended to curb the excesses of the Red Guards, as the urban youth were sent to the countryside to work alongside the peasantry and receive a practical on-the-ground education among them, as well as provide medical, educational, and technical expertise which were vital for rural development.
The militant tendencies of the Red Guards were redirected towards programs to “serve the people,” such as the renewed emphasis on rural education, establishing numerous primary, secondary, and high schools which synthesized conventional curricula with practical education in “Basic Agricultural Knowledge” and “Basic Industrial Knowledge,” as well as made significant advancements in the spread of rural literacy for both the youth and adults. In tandem there was the creation of the Barefoot Doctors program, in which nearly two million peasants were trained to provide free medical care throughout rural China where such services had historically been effectively non-existent. The work of the Barefoot Doctors and the rural medical clinics that they established helped effectively wipe out a number of infectious diseases through simple preventive medical care and contributed to a significant increase in the average Chinese lifespan from around 50 years in 1966 to over 65 when the program was ended in 1980 as part of the market reforms under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership. In tandem with this mass mobilization and significant expansion of social services came a massive political upheaval that challenged the entrenched party leadership with the institution of a new organ of social order: the Revolutionary Committee. This was a key innovation of the Cultural Revolution which drastically transformed the governing structure of the People’s Republic - each committee was composed of democratically elected, directly recallable leadership drawn from three mass organizations: the Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Army, and the Red Guards, and would be formed to administer factories, communes, and provinces. Mobilized peasants and workers were able to engage in political decision making and check the authority of local leadership in ways that before the Cultural Revolution there had been a failure to address. Far more so than the excesses of the Red Guards during the early days of the Cultural Revolution, this was the “chaos” which the rightist party officials despaired over, as mass organizations and Revolutionary Committees empowered the working masses to exercise increased autonomy. This particular development served to address the gap between the Party and the masses which had contributed to the failure of collectivization in the Great Leap Forward.
While the military had been deployed to curb the excesses of the Red Guards, the majority of the violence of the Cultural Revolution was actually inflicted by the People’s Liberation Army against Red Guards and other radicals: this was because the primary motivating factor in the deployment of the military was a fear that should the “mass mobilization” phase of the Cultural Revolution continue unchecked, rightist elements within the People’s Liberation Army who disapproved of the Cultural Revolution’s overturning of the established order would move to seize power or create an outright civil war. With this in mind, it becomes clearer that the violence of the Cultural Revolution was not a “purge” in the same sense as the “Terror” in the Soviet Union, but more of a proto-civil conflict between the masses and the entrenched bureaucracy and military, which each had their supporting factions with the Communist Party. This is also why initially, the military took a predominant position in the Revolutionary Committees in the first few years of their existence as a means to try to appease those forces. However, with time the faction within the Communist Party aligned with Mao and favoring the Cultural Revolution pushed back against the disproportionate power of the military and the power faction led by Lin Bao, culminating in the latter’s attempted escape and plane crash after his son attempted to organize a coup. From that point forward, the People’s Liberation Army representatives were pushed back into an equal position within the Revolutionary Committees alongside the representatives from the Communist Party and Red Guards, demilitarizing the newly organized apparatus of the Revolutionary Committee and coming more in line with the radical “mass line” model Mao envisioned during the period from 1971 to 1976, though admittedly with more limited further mobilization.
As this understanding of the different “phases” of the Cultural Revolution shows, the mainstream narrative of the ten year period as an extended catastrophe of total disorder is demonstrably shown to be false, and this holds true when looking at the economic sphere. After an initial minor downturn during the initial phase from 1966 to 1968, the country saw overall steady growth on the whole over the course of those ten years. During this time period, China’s rate of economic growth was still comparable to that of Indonesia and twice that of India, being around 6%. Central to the economic projects implemented as part of the Cultural Revolution was the establishment of state-subsidized rural enterprises organized by the commune system and focused on advancing agricultural industrialization by producing farming and irrigation equipment, fertilizers, machine parts, and other vital goods. Unlike in the Great Leap Forward, where economic initiatives tended to come from the higher echelons of the party, the economic projects of the Cultural Revolution were directed by peasantry based on the local, immediate needs which they had. This sort of popular direction from rural workers resulted in the widespread availability of farming machinery and the mechanization of agriculture, serving to exemplify the links between the economic and political transformations of the Cultural Revolution, both “proletarianizing” the peasantry through rural development that the peasants themselves directed and transforming the national democracy into a proper dictatorship of the proletariat as the rural working class were given.
Far beyond China, the ideals of the Cultural Revolution mobilized communists globally at a time when the Soviet Union had become a stagnant, bureaucratic state which had set aside advancing global proletarian revolution in favor of opportunistic state capitalism, In the eyes of young radicals, the revolutionary transformation of China that was being spearheaded by Red Guards who were their same age was a galvanizing shock, encouraging them to try to take their own revolutionary action and attempts to mobilize the masses in their own countries. In the United States, the Black Panther Party and a wide-ranging coalition of the “New Left” formed such a significant threat that American intelligence services had to bring many of the anti-communist strategies of Operation Gladio home, while the union of militant worker organizations and student radicals in China inspired and found its mirror in the May ‘68 uprisings in France that threatened to recreate the Paris Commune of nearly a century ago, and the contributions of Mao Zedong to Marxist theory developed in the Cultural revolution would motivate the organization of the New People’s Army in the Philippines, a guerilla revolutionary force which continues to control territory and resist government forces to this day. Globally among movements of radicalized students and peasants, the Cultural Revolution served as a primary source of inspiration for their own political goals and practice.
The fact of the matter is that the China where Deng Xiaoping and his rightist clique took power by wresting it from the “Gang of Four” was not some smoking ruin of political upheaval and economic turmoil, but thriving and dynamic. A decade of the operation of the Revolutionary Committees was cultivating a culture of mass political involvement and autonomy, desperately needed healthcare and education services had been established for free throughout parts of the country which had been long neglected even when the Party came to power, and the successful industrialization of agriculture and establishment of rural enterprises had primed China for an economic take-off under any leadership that rose to the level of mere competence. The current Communist Party of China deliberately distances itself from the Cultural Revolution because in a number of ways its ideals are decidedly contrary to the party’s current practices in a number of ways: the emphasis on the continuation of class struggle under socialism can be difficult to square with the more permissive social corporatism and market-driven economics of the contemporary People’s Republic. Deng Xiaoping denigrated the successes of the Cultural Revolution throughout the 1970s in economic development even as he reaped their benefits and used the increased agricultural output and rural industrial enterprises as the engines of an economic boom that came at the cost of the Cultural Revolution’s successes in healthcare, education, social welfare, and political involvement, as well as the destruction of the commune system and the Revolutionary Committees. The ultimate failing of the Cultural Revolution was that ultimately its political reforms had not gone far enough to complete the ties between the Party and the masses, leading to China taking the capitalist road and abandoning the project of developing their “national democracy” into a dictatorship of the proletariat in favor of a dirigiste bourgeois state.
Reflecting on the Cultural Revolution, we find the promise of a large-scale socialist order where the masses and the revolutionary vanguard are joined, a promise that was ultimately not realized by the end of the ten year period and dismantled by opportunists in the Communist Party who have retained control for decades to come. In the over one hundred and fifty years of experimentation in proletarian dictatorship, the Cultural Revolution was one the most sustained and extensive of these experiments. The structure of revolutionary committees with recallable cadres appointed by the working masses formed a politically engaged, radical social order, but the failure to supplant the existing order and complete the reconciliation between party and masses and resolve the contradiction between them stands as the challenge presented to us, the incomplete work that we must consider, even in this current moment so far from victory.