UPHOLDING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Upholding the Cultural Revolution

So many deeds cry out to be done,

And always urgently;

The world rolls on,

Time presses.

Ten thousand years are too long,

Seize the day, seize the hour!

        --- Mao Zedong

   This year 2026 marks two anniversaries of tremendous importance:  One, the 60th anniversary of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (CR) initiated by Mao Zedong and launched in May 1966. Two, the 50th anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong on September 9, 1976, after which counter-revolutionary opponents of his goals and policies staged a coup that signaled the death knell of the of the (CR) knocking China off the socialist road and leading to a huge historical setback with the restoration of capitalism. 

   At its core, the CR is best understood as a valiant effort to address a problem that has plagued numerous societies—socialist and non-socialist—that have experienced a revolution: how to prevent the re-emergence of the kinds of oppression, suffering, and injustice that caused the revolution in the first place. Although this problem has been widespread, the CR is unique in its acknowledgement of the problem and its unprecedented analysis of the causes of the problem, including the very real possibility even in a socialist country of the emergence of a new ruling and exploitative elite from within the country’s top leadership. In 1966 socialist China, this elite was high ranking communist party officials derisively but accurately labelled “capitalist roaders” because the worldview they embraced and the policies they pushed would, if allowed to continue, result in the restoration of capitalism, (which is what had happened in the Soviet Union leading ultimately to its total collapse.)  Also unique was the CR’s emphasis on mass mobilization of broad swaths of society and of political consciousness to deal with the problem. 

   Despite such major breakthroughs, the Cultural Revolution has been widely disparaged as senseless chaos and violence.  But it is important to remember that history is written by the victors, that much of this literature was written or inspired by opponents, targets, and victims of the Cultural Revolution, along with Western apologists for capitalism as the only alternative.  Yes, as with any serious world-shaking revolution, there were widespread abuses and excesses, but the causes and perpetrators of the violence require more careful analysis than they typically receive.  

   That said, we argue strongly that the main thrust of the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao and its many accomplishments ought to be remembered and firmly upheld. With mostly positive examples but also important negative ones, the Cultural Revolution provides crucial lessons for any future attempts to break free of imperialism’s and capitalism’s chains of oppression and exploitation and undertake the uphill climb to the more just and liberatory future that socialism offers and which is inherently impossible for capitalism to provide. Mao’s overall plan and guidance for the Cultural Revolution was laid out in the famous “16 Points” (August 8, 1966) in which it was stated that “at present, our objective is to struggle against and overthrow 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 not in correspondence with the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.”[2] The involvement of the masses in the Cultural Revolution was witnessed by a U.S. couple who were teachers at the Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing: 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.[3]  During the Cultural Revolution, student and youth Red Guards responded to Chairman Mao’s call for the masses to “bombard the headquarters,” by attacking the “Four Olds” -- old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits – and upholding the “newborn socialist things.” The shoots of the future society in the present-day society to which the Cultural Revolution gave birth included: 

 

 
  • a reformed educational system designed to serve the people, not replicate an elite, with the sons and daughters of workers and peasants brought into higher education;
 
  • students going to the countryside to live and work among the peasants and help break down the historic divisions under class society between the city and the countryside and between intellectual and manual labor;
 
  • a system of “barefoot doctors” (paramedics) bringing basic modern health care for the first time to the rural masses;
 
  • factory worker participation in “three-in-one teams” with technicians and cadre helping to break down the division between intellectual and manual labor;
 
  • longstanding feudal attitudes toward women criticized and uprooted under Mao’s famous poetical dictum that “women hold up half the sky;”
 
  • model revolutionary operas and ballets developed featuring heroic worker and peasant characters replacing archaic feudal characters;
 
  • widespread dissemination of Marxist writings and communist principles.
 China’s economic development was not neglected under the Cultural Revolution, as is often alleged; the economy in fact grew and improvements in the well-being of the masses of people took place.  However, unlike in today’s China, moral incentives as applications of the communist principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” were emphasized over material and monetary ones.  Politics rather than profit was put in command of production as illustrated by the slogan: “Grasp revolution, promote production.”  Acquiring knowledge continued to be regarded as of value, but model students and workers aspired to be “both a red and an expert” and, above all, to “serve the people.”  While trade and other interactions with foreign countries took place, economic development during this period came about mostly through China’s own self-reliant means -- without entering into the colonial kind of dependency China had suffered from so heavily in the past. Though the Cultural Revolution spread throughout China’s vast geography, the city of Shanghai with its large working class was the epicenter. In January 1967, the old rightist bureaucratic city government in Shanghai was overthrown by rebel students and workers in response to Mao’s call and replaced initially by the Shanghai Commune.[4] This was inspired by the 1871 Paris Commune which was hailed by Marx as “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour." Shanghai’s “January Storm” led to the seizure of power by revolutionaries from capitalist-roaders in other parts of China. On a national level, it brought forth a new set of leaders Mao could rely upon to carry the Cultural Revolution further – Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen, a former worker. Along with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, these would be arrested in a counter-revolutionary coup after Mao’s death in the fall of 1976 and then put on a show trial as the “Gang of Four.” Deng Xiaoping and other capitalist-roaders who had been toppled in the Cultural Revolution (and, in Deng’s case, removed from office once again prior to Mao’s death) came back into power. The Chinese Cultural Revolution also had a tremendous impact on a world scale. It put new energy back into the moribund communist movement, inspiring people in both the Third World and the advanced capitalist countries to organize into new revolutionary parties and groups and to rise up against their oppressors. (The authors of this essay, reflecting on our exuberant youth, were some of them.) China during the Cultural Revolution provided vocal and material support to many National Liberation Movements waging armed struggle, and Mao issued several statements supporting the freedom struggles of the African-American people.  China’s current “communist” rulers would like the Cultural Revolution and its achievements to be wiped from popular memory. All of the aforementioned “Newborn Socialist Things,” including the People’s Communes of collectivized agriculture formed during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, have been dismantled by China’s post-1976 leadership -- with much of the economy turned over to the filthy rich and their wanna-bes (and with businessmen even allowed to join the Communist Party). Today’s “Red China” has the dubious distinction of surpassing the U.S. with having the world’s most billionaires.  Meanwhile millions of low-paid workers, often recent immigrants to the city from the countryside, slave in domestically or foreign-owned factories -- like Foxconn which produces Apple’s iPhones for American consumers. Those Chinese elders from the Cultural Revolution who still try to uphold Mao’s revolutionary vision are hounded by the authorities, in spite of which many people -- including a new generation of youth --  are drawn to read Mao’s writings, which speak to their sense of alienation from the current system and their yearning for a more equal and participatory society.[5]   While a portion of the Chinese economy remains in the hands of the State and there is some overall planning for national economic goals, this is really state capitalism, not revolutionary socialism with the working masses being the masters of society and with the progressive restriction of bourgeois right and ideology en route to communism. (See the accompanying essay, “Revolution in the Revolution.”) Under so-called “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” the transition to a cooperative and egalitarian society – one that is no longer based upon the exploitation of wage labor and on commodity production and exchange -- has been put off to an indefinite future.  It has put off to a time, if ever, when the productive forces are supposedly more sufficiently developed -- even though China is already the world’s leader in a great many areas of advanced technology and ranks at or near the top of various important global economic indexes. To conclude, Mao reflected shortly before his death that “I have only done two things in my life: one is to overthrow the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek, and the other is the Cultural Revolution." The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a valiant struggle by Mao and his closest followers to mobilize the masses to keep China firmly on the socialist road and prevent the restoration of capitalism. This effort, which lasted through many twists and turns for ten whole years, was ultimately defeated. Nevertheless, as with the Paris Commune and the Bolshevik Revolution, its historical experience will not be forgotten by us revolutionaries; and its lessons, both positive and negative, will be put to use during the next revolutionary anti-capitalist wave. As Mao showed, beyond the necessary seizure of state power and the nationalization of the commanding means of production as called for by Marx and Engels in “The Communist Manifesto,” real socialism requires continuous struggle by the politically-motivated masses facilitated by a principled, dedicated and far-seeing revolutionary leadership. 
NOTES


[1] Similarly, the reasons for the Cultural Revolution’s defeat rarely receive the searching historical materialist analysis they require.

[2] In Mao’s 16 point guidelines for the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the 6th point on the “Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” stressed the importance of distinguishing between the small number of capitalist-roaders and the vast majority of the people and that any different views among the latter should be resolved through reasoned debate, not by coercion or force.  However, rival factions formed – sometimes with counter-revolutionary support – which led to violent outbreaks.  Eventually, the PLA had to intervene to put an end to internecine struggles.   

[3] Decision of the CC of the CPC Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,  https://www.marxists.org/subject/china/peking-review/1966/PR1966-33g.htm   

[4] David Milton and Nancy Milton, The Wind Will Not Subside: Years in Revolutionary China, (New York; Pantheon Books, 1975), http://archive.org/details/windwillnotsubsi00milt.

[5] Point 9 of the “16 Points” had called for the establishment of Cultural Revolution groups, committees, and congresses as new permanent organs of power with elected, recallable members based on the principles of the Paris Commune.  The Shanghai Commune as such lasted only for 20 days to be replaced for the city, at Mao’s recommendation, by a governing “three-in-one” revolutionary committee consisting of young rebels, veteran cadre and the military.  Revolutionary committees on this model were then widely established in schools, workplaces, etc. around the Peoples’ Republic.  For much more about these events from a sympathetic scholar, see Hongsheng Jiang, “The Paris Commune in Shanghai: The Masses, the State, and Dynamics of" Continuous Revolution".” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University, 2010).    

[6] Yu Yue, China’s Youth Turn to Mao Zedong Thought | East Asia Forum, China, June 5, 2026, https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/06/05/chinas-youth-turn-to-mao-zedong-thought/.