Workers World Vol. 18, No. 10
March 3 – One indubitable characteristic of the proletarian Cultural Revolution of the mid-sixties was its tremendous appeal to the masses of students, workers, intellectuals, as well as the peasants. Even the most intransigent opponents of the Revolution find it hard to deny that it evoked a genuine response, particularly among the young.
Moreover, the Revolution soon developed a spontaneous character and momentum of its own. It can truly be said of it, this “it touched the soul” of the millions.
It is nonetheless true that this revolutionary explosion was ignited at the top, and had its origins in the unceasing struggle at the very summits of the Chinese Communist leadership. But no government and no leader, no matter what illustrious position he or she may hold, can evoke at will a genuine groundswell of revolutionary enthusiasm unless the soil for it has been prepared by historical conditions. The conditions were ripe for it in China.
No, the Cultural Revolution was not a fake, as its detractors would have us believe. It was not a stage-managed affair. During the course of the Revolution large groups of participants were politically manipulated, of course, and driven into blind factional strife here and there, with excessive acts of rebellion. No real revolution is ever really without them.
However, the lasting achievement of the Revolution was that it secured the social foundations of the People’s Republic upon which a genuine socialist society can be built. It secured that which is absolutely indispensable for the further socialist evolution of the country. It safeguarded the new property relations which emerged after the overthrow of the Chiang Kai-shek regime and the compradore bourgeoisie.
The lasting achievement of the Cultural Revolution lay precisely in the fact that it not only secured and safeguarded the new forms of property relations, but that it also strengthened them against future depredations and reactionary incursions. Objectively, it set back the neo-restorationist movement.
The Cultural Revolution, however, did not achieve what was the avowed objective of the Radicals – a highly idealized Paris Commune-type of proletarian dictatorship. Inevitably, as soon as the Rightists were crushed, the Radicals were swept away and slowly but surely some of the old prominent figures of the Right were restored – to the dismay and chagrin of the Radicals.
But the social foundations of the new regime were made secure against a full scale counter-revolution and the road to capitalist restoration was barred.
This does not necessarily mean that a new rightward trend, even a serious one, is excluded for a certain period, given the fact that so many of the old figures connected with the Rightists were restored to powerful positions, with immense authority. Perhaps chief among them is Teng Hsio-ping, who has for some time symbolized the trend and has been widely publicized abroad.
However, the Rightists are occupying positions in a new historical context which differs markedly from the mid-sixties. The country is in a stronger position both in industry and in agriculture. The proletariat is much more numerous and the peasantry is collectivized. It is not necessary to exaggerate the achievements of the Cultural Revolution to make the point that even if the Rightists retained and deepened their hold on the governmental apparatus, the future of the Chinese Revolution is not likely to be endangered in the way it was in the mid-sixties.
Nor should it be said that the Radical elements, who are now threatening Teng Hsiao-ping at the behest of Chairman Mao, are the same people who fired the imagination of the Red Guards and the young students in Shanghai and Canton.
Gone, of course, are the old leaders of the Radical faction, former Defense Minister Lin Piao; Chen Po-ta, a former member of the standing committee of the Politburo, and for many years Mao’s personal secretary; Huang Yung-sheng, former chief of the general staff of the armed forces; Wu Fa-hsien, commander of the air force; Li Tso-peng, deputy chief of staff of the political commissar of the navy; Chiu Hui-tso, deputy chief of staff of the army and head of the logistics department; Yeh Chun, a member of the party Politburo and director of the administrative office of the party military affairs committee; and Lin Li-kuo, Lin’s son who was deputy director of the air force operations department.
The Radicals of today are by the standards of the Cultural Revolution of the mid-sixties, moderates, with exceptions, such as Chiang Ching, and Yao Wen of the Shanghai University. And even these exceptions should be made with the greatest reservations.
The new struggle in China takes place, as we said, in a different historical setting, much more favorable to the cause of socialism. But the mass of the people have no part in it, certainly as of now. It is strictly controlled from the top and has the earmarks of a classical succession struggle rather than those of a new social upheaval.
The message coming out from Peking to the world is altogether different from the one during the Cultural Revolution. The latter had a tremendous salutary effect on the international arena. It gave a profound impetus to the millions of oppressed in the under-developed countries of the world. It provided a strong stimulus to the revolutionary youth movement in the West to whom the Cultural Revolution was a symbol of resistance to all of bourgeoisdom.
“Dare to struggle! Dare to win!” was a challenge picked up by the youth and hurled at the capitalist establishment everywhere.
True, the Cultural Revolution did not move the well-established Communist Parties with mass influence who, in the main, had already surrendered long ago to revisions policies encouraged by the Soviet leadership, often to the right of Khrushchev and Brezhnev.
The world bourgeoisie was initially confused by the Cultural Revolution. However, it soon got the message very straight, indeed. It came in the form of a dramatic event well calculated to illustrate the meaning of that Revolution to Western imperialism.
It was the rude and unceremonious eviction of several Western nuns from a monastery in Shanghai without notice and in such a manner as to clearly indicate that the Revolution was aimed at getting rid of the vestiges of imperialist domination, and all residues of reaction – all that is bourgeois and reactionary.
From then on the attitude of the imperialist bourgeoisie to the Cultural Revolution was one of implacable hatred.
How different in the message that Peking has now signaled to Western imperialism in general and Washington in particular! And how differently the messages have, in reality, been received!
Now that Richard Nixon is back at San Clemente and the furor over his personal participation has died down, his mission to Peking, as we indicated in our earlier article, is now in clearer focus. Whereas, the unceremonious ouster of the nuns served to illustrate the hostility to capitalist restoration at home and imperialism abroad, the invitation to Nixon (regarded as an attempt to rehabilitate him) was a bid by Peking for a virtual alliance with imperialism against the USSR. The two contrasting messages from China, the one that ushered in the Cultural Revolution and the current one, are at polar opposites. The former was the hallmark of militant anti-imperialism so far as the world was concerned. The latter is toadying up to what was formerly called in China the “greatest enemy of mankind.”
Of course the Cultural Revolution was, if it was anything, also a fierce struggle against Soviet revisionism. But the struggle against it was conducted in the framework of the over-all struggle against the capitalist roaders and imperialism. Khrushchev, Kosygin and Brezhnev were denounced precisely because they were either in collusion with the imperialists or promoting and encouraging capitalist restoration in China. The main enemy, nevertheless, was still imperialism.
But how different it is today! The main enemy is now conceived to be the USSR. It is now the “main danger.”
Whereas China’s foreign policy during the Cultural Revolution stirred millions into struggle against the imperialist colossus, China’s current foreign policy evokes the wrath of millions of oppressed against the Maoist alliance with imperialism, as for example, in Angola. It has generated cynicism among the young and has discredited the cause of the socialist revolution and the People’s Republic of China.
It would be wrong however to conclude that the reactionary Chinese foreign policy ipso facto makes the Maoist struggle, and with it the struggle of the Radical faction against the Rightists, one that is lacking in progressive content so far as domestic policy goes. On the contrary, checking the rightward trend may have a wholesome effect in the course of the internal struggle in China.
The tendency represented by Teng, as established in the Cultural Revolution, has nothing to recommend it to the working class of China. His record since his rehabilitation to such a high office, contains nothing to distinguish his position from the anti-Soviet line of the Radical faction. And it is only the post connections that one in the outside world has to go by in analyzing the current situation.
Only the external features of the struggle in China – that is, foreign policy – are clearly discernible and no inside information, no special briefing is necessary to clearly recognize the fundamental aspects of Chinese foreign policy today. Its essence is a bid for an alliance with imperialism, not merely against the revisionist Soviet bureaucracy, but against the Soviet Union, another socialist state – and alliance with imperialism against the liberation movement, as exemplified by attitudes to the People’s Republic of Angola and to socialist Cuba.
Foreign policy is usually an extension of domestic policy. But the two are not always in conformity and on occasion stand in contradiction to each other. This is particularly so, for example, with the Soviet Union – a workers’ state with vast bureaucratic deformations and growing inequality, but nevertheless a progressive social formation as compared with the decadent capitalist social system.
The foreign policy of the Soviet bureaucracy cannot be said to have been in harmony with its class foundations, with what Brezhnev in his report to the 25th Party Congress called the “obvious class difference” in social structure with capitalism. The conciliatory and class collaborationist policy of the Kremlin toward imperialism long been a keystone of Soviet foreign policy and is in sharp contradiction to its revolutionary social structure.
This has not foreclosed the possibility of the USSR (as it does not foreclose China) of playing a progressive role in foreign affairs under certain circumstances, as witness its aid to the People’s Republic of Angola, earlier to Vietnam, to Cuba, and other socialist countries.
All this merely illustrates that the Soviet Union in its present stage of evolution is a contradictory social phenomenon, as is also the People’s Republic of China. No one has done more to uncover the existence of the class struggle in China than has Mao. The continued sharpening of the class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat is a revelation that the workers’ state is beset with acute social contradictions, of which the most serious at the present time is the foreign policy misadventures of the People’s Republic of China’s leadership.
From this it follows that the policy of a working class party in this country, as anywhere else, has to be based on revolutionary class independence – not of the Marchais or Berlinguer type, but of the type that Lenin taught and practiced, particularly during his lifetime as the head of the first workers’ state.
In the contemporary epoch it means to support both China and the USSR as socialist countries and to support their effort to combat internal bourgeois reaction. But it also means to vigorously oppose any manifestations of such violent breaches of proletarian internationalism as manifested by the Chinese leadership in the case of Angola and by the Soviet leadership in all too many instances over a much longer period.
Last updated: 11 May 2026