Recently I tried to get some Chinese language practice by making small talk with a woman worker sitting next to me on an airplane to China. Somehow, the conversation got around to the Cultural Revolution. Like many workers in China you might meet today, she immediately felt compelled to tell me how that particular ten year period, 1966-1976, was a disaster for China.
This worker’s idea of this period being a “disaster” for China comes from the capitalists who run China today. China’s educational system, like that of the U.S. and every other capitalist country, teaches the lies that the capitalists want workers to believe—and they have the gall to call themselves the “Chinese Communist Party.” China’s capitalist bosses use their state power to attack the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution with a ferocity matched only by professional anticommunist academics in the U.S.
The attacks on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution serve to mask the achievements of millions of workers won to communism, who dared to defend the 1949 Chinese Revolution, when the working class seized state power. Today, despite calling themselves “communist,” the bosses hold state power in China. Our class lost power there around the time of the Cultural Revolution, and the entire world we live in is controlled by a tiny capitalist class in each country who live by the labor others do for them: the international working class.
If our class sisters and brothers are to ever smash this capitalist hell with its imperialist wars and sharpening racist and sexist attacks worldwide, the Cultural Revolution is a key piece of history to understand. Fortunately for those fighting for a worker-run, egalitarian world, that is, for real communism, there are scholars like Yiching Wu.
Masses Fought Back With Creativity and Courage
In 238 pages of The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis (2014), Wu pulls together information from about 400 sources, most in Chinese and many previously unavailable, to critically examine the political trends “at the margins” of the Cultural Revolution. It is a story of vast upheaval and class war, where ordinary workers fought with courage and creativity in an effort to take China to the road of true equality, communism. This book is of particular interest to members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party, because Yiching Wu reaches many of the same conclusions that PLP published in 1971.
Now is an important moment to reexamine this history. 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and also the 50th anniversary of a exploding class war in China.
In 1967, masses of workers in the city of Shanghai expelled the fake “Communist” Party misleaders and seized control of the city, defiantly declaring it the “Shanghai Commune.” Elsewhere, groups like Shengwulian in Hunan Province, the Bohai Battle Regiment in Shandong Province, and others, organized opposition to evolving systems of exploitation inside the socialist state.
They criticized the “Communist” Party’s decision in the 1950s to set up a system of material incentives for party leaders and mangers. They argued that such a system had created conditions for the development of a new ruling class, as it had in the Soviet Union, where capitalism was fully restored by that time. This system, which ranked cadres (managers, usually Party members) and Party leaders in over 20 grades with different salaries and access to better housing, schools, private cars, medical care and even domestic servants. Groups like Shengwulian criticized what they called the “bureaucratic capitalist” class.
History Written By The Rulers
Most workers in China today, let alone workers around the world, never learn about these mass communist uprisings that shook China’s new so-called “communist” capitalist class to its core.
The standard narrative of the Cultural Revolution is that Mao Zedong and other leaders inside the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) saw that the Soviet Union’s way of building socialism after the workers took power there was leading back to capitalism. So, the top leaders launched the Cultural Revolution to keep the same thing from happening in China. Supposedly, under the ground rules of that CCP-sanctioned campaign, ordinary workers and students were encouraged to criticize those party members and managers who were “taking the capitalist road.”
This narrative paints Mao as its central hero, who, in January of 1967, determined that enough “capitalist roaders” had been removed from power. The story goes that as soon as he died, pro-capitalist elements of the CCP and within a few years, presto! China had become the capitalist country we know today.
This story completely ignores the mass rebellions and uprisings made by the working class against the government in 1967, the year that the capitalists had supposedly been chased out. The tens of millions of workers, students, peasants and former soldiers joined mass organizations like the Shanghai Commune and Shengwulian - in opposition to what they viewed as the return of full-blown capitalism.
More and more scholarship is being published that upends the dominant narrative of the Cultural Revolution.
Today’s world is under the control of competing groups of capitalists, each trying to grow their economic and political dominance (a process called “imperialism”), and world war becomes more likely every day. Creating a peaceful worker-run society without exploitation is the goal of communist revolution. The only way to prevent inter-imperialist war is to eliminate the economic system that produces imperialism, to eliminate capitalism.
Today’s communists must study the great revolutions of the past, including the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was defeated primarily because these millions of workers still held on to the idea of fighting for socialism first, and communism later—a view PLP rejected in 1982, in large part based on the experiences of the Cultural Revolution. Our literature analyzes the success and failures of the old movement elsewhere.  
PLP fights on from the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. We will not stop until communist ideas are once again mass ideas, and next time, we will take communist revolution all the way.