![]() Such a task would require mobilizing the masses outside the party, who had no shortage of reasons to gripe about the disconnect and corruption of the state bureaucracy. Mao had been looking for ways to purge the party of the more rightist faction years before the Cultural Revolution using internal party channels but there efforts were to no avail. Like the ruling bureaucracy of all the classic Stalinist nations we can see two general factions in the CCP – those like Mao who wanted to maintain autarky and a command economy, and those like Deng Xiaopeng who favored the continued existence of internal markets and gradual development. Voluntaristic and extremist policies were avoided and Mao was reduced to a more symbolic “father of the country” style figure in the party, though his theories were still official state doctrine. After the enormous human toll of Mao’s failed policies in the Great Leap Forward much of the CCP took a more conservative stance on economic issues. ![]() In no way was the GPCR a spontaneous event. This was not a Marxist theory of revolution, but rather a populist theory that was not dissimilar from Bismark’s Kulturkamf. Maoist theory claimed that the superstructure was “relatively autonomous” from the base and hence a “cultural revolution” was needed to purge the revisionist leadership within the CCP. In Mao’s eyes the remaining contradictions of society were contained strictly within the political/cultural superstructure, for the economic base no longer contained class antagonism. ![]() Yet it was clear that China in 1966 was no workers utopia that had ridden itself of all social contradiction. Marxist-Leninist dogmatism claims that the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, nationalization of property and establishment of central planning under the rule of party eliminates the basis of class antagonisms. There is no separate category of Cultural Revolution differentiated from the revolution which transforms the totality of social relations. Marx viewed proletarian revolution as a process that is not merely political but social. The very concept of Cultural Revolution is foreign to Marx’s conception of revolution. But in the end Mao’s Cultural Revolution wasn’t much different from Stalin’s – an attempt to solve the problems of socialism-in-one-country through purging the state leadership of corrupt “capitalist roaders” rather than changing the social relations that led these corrupt positions to develop. Gaps in authority were certainly created by Mao’s chaotic tactics of consolidating power and workers certainly took advantage of these gaps in authority. A more apt description would be that it was a bureaucratic power struggle that in many cases got out of hand. To call what happened during the years considered the height of the GPCR (66-69) a revolution, nonetheless a proletarian one, is certainly a misnomer. Maoism only promised “the right to rebel” to the extent that rebellion stayed within the confines of Maoism. If anything, the Cultural Revolution exposes the poverty of Maoist politics. “It is right to rebel” being taken up as a slogan made the Maoists seem like they were more anarchist than the anarchists, the “hardest” of the revolutionaries. The New Left in general was enamored by the events in China and radical newspapers from the era are full of Mao portraits and quotes from the Little Red Book. Maoists such as the RCP and Kasama and even more anarchist leftists like Michael Albert see the event as evidence of the liberatory potential of Maoist thought. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is claimed by many Maoists as the highest point of communism in the history of mankind.
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